Getting Back To It
Dec 12-13, 2014

I had to take a hiatus for a bit and earn some money. I ended up getting one job, then a week later, getting another. The first job was temporary, so when it ran it's course, I was left with the second:L A General Warehouse Associate for the Home Depot. I'm enjoying the work and the company. One thing the Home Depot does is participate in community activities.

On Friday morning, some fellow associates and I went out to a disabled veteran's place in Silverton and did some work to make his home more wheelchair accessible. It was a great day of work with everyone kicking in and having fun. I quit early so I could go to the Boathouse.

It's been nearly 3 months since I have been back. Everything was still here, including a couple other kayaks left over from the Boat Show

It was a GORGEOUS day on the coast. They'd been having some terrible weather but today, everything was beautiful.

I'm going to be making a Goose to use as an adventure boat in 2015 and 2016. I've had a lot of adventures in the 8' version of this boat, now it is time to move up. For construction, I am starting with the fiddy bits - the mast, spars, and foils. The hull will go together in a couple weekends, the time eater will be the little pieces that'll make it go. I stopped by a bargain barn wood store and they were selling 5/4x6 pieces of Aeloa(?) wood. I liked the color, so decided to make my spars out of it.

The boards were 10' long and I needed a mast over 13', so I had to lengthen the wood with scarf joints. This will be a hollow box mast with 1/2" staves making up the sides. I didn't buy enough Aeola wood for the spars, so I got some scrap out of the rafters to make the 2x2s for those. Everything needed to be epoxied together, so I was dryfitting everything before gluing and clamping.

And there we go - not the lightest pieces of timber so I might be making new spars later this year. That was it for the night - I'll glue up the mast the next day.

Saturday was even prettier than Friday - while driving up the Bay Road, I saw Bill out rowing his yawl. Look at how calm and still the Yaquina river is - everything was like glass.

At the Boathouse, Patience and her mother, Connie, showed up for a work day. Patience had made me a Christmas present - a candle jar. She is just a sweetheart.

We were getting ready to make the mast, which is hollow. I need to put spacers in the mast to reinforce it. I wanted to have 3 spacers over 9' so I asked Patience how we'd do it. We decided to divide up the 108 inches into 4 sections, the spacers would go between the sections. How far apart are the spacers? How many times does 4 go into 108? I did long division on the board and Patience asked me what the heck I was doing, so I asked her how she'd do it. "With a calculator." Don't they teach you how to do division any more? "Yes, but we do it like this." Draw 4 circles, then put an equal number of marks in each circle (remainder goes outside).

Well, she got the same answer I did, so it's not wrong, just different. I asked her what she'd do if she needed to divide large numbers? She said "Use a calculator." Can you do division in your head? "I have a calculator on my phone." OK. OK. It works, so there you have it.

Next was gluing the mast, and once the epoxy came out, there was no time for pictures. These hollow masts are great, light, strong, and the staves self align when assembled. We wrapped everything with packing tape and packed up for the weekend. Next week: Finishing the mast.