I’d be lying if I said times were good and the weeks since Christmas have been particularly tough for a number of reasons. I can’t say anymore publicly but whats important is that I’m working hard and making progress. My next target is to raise sufficient funds to be able to purchase my next lot of epoxy by the beginning of February so that I can get motoring again.

Anyhoo here it is, another year and, scarily, the beginning of my sixth year of building ‘Gleda’. I’ve always been wary of falling into the trap of ‘perpetual building’ that many other have done. I’ve always tried to stay focused on the fact that I was actually a sailor who just so happened to be building a boat.

I set out on this journey with a five year build in mind and loyal readers may recall that my original launch date was May 1st 2012. For reasons documented elsewhere in this blog I made the decision to extend that deadline by twelve months in Spring last year, my intention was to focus all my time and energy on building the business that would finance completion of the build and subsequent cruising funds thereafter.

Unfortunately it hasn’t happened, if anything I’ve gone backwards and truth be told, at this point in time completion and launch of ‘Gleda’ seem like an impossible dream.

I confess that I’ve been in a dark place these past months, it’d would be easy to succumb to depression and helplessness and I have the scars to show how hard I’ve been fighting. But this New Year has brought new hope. My head is in a much better place, my optimism is high and I’ll be doing my damnedest to make 2012 the best year of the build yet.

It’ll need to be if I’m to reach my target for this time next year because by then I want the hulls sheathed and painted, portlights and hatches installed and the interiors fitted out well enough that I can live aboard. I also want the beams built, sheathed and painted so that the boat can be assembled and put on the water if needed. It’s a big ask I know but if I’m to reach to re-vised launch date of May 1st 2013 one year and four months away it has to happen.

Image Credited to Magda Biskup

I came across this short photo blog the other day and it got me thinking. The post was written and photographed by Magda Biskup and placed on her Destination World blog (links at the end of this article)

She tells the story of a guy called Peter, he’s now 74 and spent 38 years constructing his dream yacht with the intention of one day sailing around the Pacific Ocean. The yacht is huge and requires a crew of 14 to sail her and thereby hangs the problem, Peter can’t get the crew together to fulfil his ambition…… shame.

I’ve been very aware from the start of this project that it was about going sailing and not about building a boat, I’m also very aware that it’s now coming up to 5 years since I cut the first piece of timber. If I achieve my launch target of May 2013 then I’ll have been working for the best part of six and a half years.

The clock is ticking and I’m not getting any younger. I can’t afford to spend another 5 years on the build, I want ‘Gleda’ on the water and soon! I started with the end in mind but the years can blur the focus and building becomes the aim not the means. I won’t let that happen. Somehow, someway, I need to scrape up some money for a new stock of epoxy supplies and get back to work right after Christmas. 2012 has got to be the last full year of building.

I hope Peter finds his crew and fulfils his dream real soon, ‘Gleda’ will be rigged for single handed sailing so I know that won’t hold me up, I just hope it doesn’t take me 38 years to launch because I’m not sure I’ll be up to the sailing when I’m 88!

I’d encourage you to go take a look at Magda’s blog, her photos are stunning and I particularly like the rope study I re-produced above.

Here’s the link: Sailing Sydney – Magda Biskup

Peter is 74 years old. He arrived in Australia in 1961 in a cargo ship and he was supposed to stay just for a few months, visiting his sister, and then going back home, to the Netherlands. But plans seldom work out. It was the same in Peter’s case. He was offered a job in Australia, then another one, and somehow what was to be just a few months in Australia turned into 50 years.

Peter has been sailing since he was 6 years old. And he always dreamed of his own yacht. So he decided to build one himself. Sometimes in the 70s he set up a workshop in his own backyard and spend next 38 years constructing a yacht of his dreams. He wanted his yacht to be a large one. And it is huge! It requires a crew of 14 to operate it and can carry up to 27 people. Unfortunately, the dream of having such a large yacht has worked against another of Peter’s dreams – a dream of sailing around Pacific Ocean. It is simply very difficult to gather a team of 14 people, who would be able to work and live together for many months.

But Peter is not giving up his dream. He keeps trying to find his crew. In the meantime, he gathers his family and friends and organises sailing trips around Sydney for them. I was lucky to take part in one of those trips last weekend.

I was happy enough with my mock-up vanity unit to go ahead and make a proper one out of 12mm ply. I fixed it in position with the magic hot melt and then thought I’d make use of a bit of ‘bendy’ MDF I had knocking about to form a nice rounded shape on the forward end of the unit. I know the thought of using MDF in a wet area seems crazy but it’s actually really good quality and has in fact already had a good soaking against the wall of the barn without too much effect. I figure that it’ll be fine as long as I give it 2 or 3 good coats of epoxy and a couple of coats of paint, worth a try anyway as I think it works really well. Next stage is to make a softwood carcass for everything to hand off and figure out the best way of closing the space under the sink. I don’t much fancy making opening doors and there’s not much room for them to swing out. Maybe sliding ones would work? Whatever I do I’ve got to stop water getting into what will be a dry storage are so maybe a PVC or canvas curtain over the front?

Once I’d got the unit roughly at the right height and levelled up I knocked together a rough version of the athwart-ships seat that I’d thought about yesterday. It’ll be hinged on one side so that it can be dropped into position for use whilst showering and washing or lifted up and fastened against the hullside when access to the loo and sail locker is needed. For it to be used in any kind of seaway it will need some sort of backrest but a thick piece of rope would probably suffice. I think this layout works really well but I’ll see what it looks like with fresh eyes tomorrow.

There’s not quite full standing headroom in this compartment except for immediately under the hatch and a permanently plumbed in shower doesn’t really appeal. I’m thinking about using one of those large garden sprayer containers that can be pressurised by hand pump, fitted with a shower headed hose and operated by a trigger. Self contained, portable and easy to replace. The only permanent fixtures in the compartment will be a vanity unit with sink (already purchased at Beaulieu Boat Jumble a couple of years ago), a freshwater hand operated tap, a hand operated bilge pump and some dry storage. Basically though I want the compartment to operate as a ‘wet room’ so that I don’t have to worry about water getting where it shouldn’t whether it be from showering or hauling wet sails and gear to and from the sail locker.

I decided that it would be easier to decide on my layout if I put in place any fixtures that need to remain the same and there really were only two namely the top two steps giving access into the compartment so that’s what I’ve worked on today. The plans show these steps as being constructed from 9mm ply but I decided I wanted something more substantial so I’ve made them from 18mm. Using my router I was able to round the front edges off nicely and once cut and finished it was a relatively easy job to epoxy them into place on the hull stringers, checking they were level of course!

I’ve had a bit of a brainwave about the compartment layout which I’ll share with you tomorrow.

After painting I got the joints between upper and lower hulls glassed over so now, after a little bit of light sanding and a wipe over I’ll be able to paint the whole compartment… looking forward to that.

I needed the paint dry so that I could close the watertight hatch prior to some sanding of the heavily filled joints between deck/tumblehomes and hullsides, I didn’t want to get my nice fresh paint all messed up. Once the sanding was finished I had another good vacuum up before mixing more epoxy for the final layer of glass tape over the two joints. This went on without problem and I was also able to finish all the other filleting. I just have the two joints between upper and lower hullsides to glass then I can give everything a final sand, clean up again and then start slapping more paint on.

Anyway I know have the first ‘compartment’ virtually finished and yes, I know it’s one of the smallest on the boat but psychologically it’s a great boost to actually start ‘finishing’ areas. It gave me a real incentive to crack on with the epoxy filleting in the sail locker as I’m really looking forward to painting a bigger area.

I was up early and cycled (Landy back tomorrow) up to the barn in the dark for a short work session that allowed me to get four of the timber fillets into place. But before I started sanding back the areas to be glued I thought I’d temporarily get the watertight hatch into position so as to stop the dust filling up the forward compartment. This watertight hatch was originally constructed by simply cutting a round hole in the forward bulkhead and then gluing a larger circle of ply to the piece that had been cut-out. I’d left the hatch in place forward of the bulkhead ever since I made it because forgetting to put it in there before gluing the deck on gives you a real problem! When the hatch is finished it will have highe density foam glued around the perimeter and will be held in place with a stainless bolt epoxied in place. a big stainless wingnut and a proper hardwood cross-piece. For now a steel coachbolt and timber off-cut do the job. Gluing the timber fillets in place went smoothly although I did make the epoxy mix a little heavy so I put a strip of peel-ply tape over fillets to stop any slumping.