Another year

Another year have past and it is time to put Xiao Feng to sleep for the winter. We have had a great summer, but I have not had the possibility to take her out as much as I would have liked... Well both her and me have many more summers in us 😄 (tried to publish this last week but for some reason it did not work...)

Marking the waterline

I have been thinking of bottom painting Xiao Feng for next season and when I pulled her out of the water yesterday I got an idea of how to mark the waterline easily. She has been in the water for just over a month so the unloaded waterline is already clearly marked on her hull, I just added a few marks along that line before cleaning her. When it is time for painting I just need to put the masking tape an inch or so above the marks (maybe a little more in the bow).

Marks

Cleaning of bottom started

Sailing (?) with crew

Took Grandma (aka my Mother) out for a sail today, so finally I had a crew that could handle the camera. Unfortunately the wind died after almost two hours of sailing, so I had to man the oars to get us home. The Walkabout is an excellent row boat so I could comfortably keep Xiao Feng at 2.5-3 knots the whole hour it took us to get back, with a little extra effort she climed up to 3.5 knots. For longer distances I think 2-2.5 knots would let you keep going for hours on end.

All in all a very nice day on the water.

Sailing out

Our destination

Wind is dying out

Grumpy at the oars

Back on the trailer

Reporting the week

We have had a week of fabulous weather so I have had time to do a lot of sailing. Unfortunately works prevented me from spending the whole week on the water. So I did shorter evening sails on the weekdays and slightly longer during the weekend. Have been practising balancing Xiao Feng so that she can steer herselves and unless there are not too much waves and the wind stays reasonably constant it works quite nice.

I also figured out how to get the GPS plots out of the box and into Google maps, below you can see the track of the two days when I brought the GPS.

Trip Saturday a week ago, featured in my last blog post

This Saturdays trip, the yellow star mark the location of my house

I have also changed the mooring arrangement so that I do not need to walk across the fore deck when climbing onboard. I have added a very long mooring line to the bouy so that I can pull her in along side the quay and then just pull her out to the bouy.

The new aft mooring line that let's me pull the stern in and out.

And finally some pictures from our trips, it is difficult to get good pictures from 'new' angles when you need to sail the boat as well. I am pondering some sort of camera attachment to the mizzen so that I can shoot some video....

At the mooring

I am planning to sail most days next week (if the weather allows), so today after my Saturday sail I left her at the mooring. She is a bit tippy when standing on the bow getting on and of but I guess I will get used to that as well.

Sailed to a island about 4 nm away, dropped the hook in a small bay and had lunch. Excellent weather today sunny and a nice 4-6 knots of wind. Brought my GPS today and we averaged 3 knots with a top speed of 5.5 knots, nice!

Tent n such

Finalized the tent today and managed to set it up from inside the boat (on land). I hope to try it out for real in a few weeks if we get nice weather on my weekend off. Finally I made some mooring lines. A really nice day today so we had to go to the beach as well.

Setting up the tent

Almost done, sweaty and grumpy

Mooring lines

Galley box mockup

Did a quick cardboard mockup of my future galley box. I need to get all the contents before I comitt to wood, so I can decide the final size. Also I need to come up,with a cleaver way of securing it to the boat.

Closed

Open

Tent approaching completion

It has been a bad week for boating, lots of rain and I had to go to Germany for a few days. When I got back Mom had made me two pouches that attach to the turn buttons along the gunwale.

One for bottles

And one with a lid

My plan was to finish the tent today, however it turns out some adjustment will be needed, especially starboard aft where I could not reach the final turn button. I must have been confused when I took the measurements, so now I will have to add some more fabric or cut it back to the next button, whichever will be easier.

All in all I am quite happy with how it turned out.

Outside

Inside, will add doors and mosquito netting to the ends.

Full scale tent

My Mother is visiting so it was time to bring out the old Singer and fix the tent. I have not been able to find tent poles so we used high pressure hoses and duct tape as tent hoops, they are a good substitute but I think I will get proper tent poles since they are easier to stow.

Setting up the ridge line and hoops.

The drawing

The first fitting

We sort of made the design up while we stitched it, so there are many modifications needed before it is done, now we call it a day and retire to the Gin & Tonic.

(I have figured out how to fix the picture size.....!!!!)

Touching up some paint

Another Valpurgis night

This is supposed to be the start of spring, but as usual the coldest day in weeks...

Cooking leather grease

Trying to cook up some leather grease. The recepie I have specify badger tallow but there is not enought badgers around so I use sheeps tallow instead.

Quite simple actually, 4 parts tallow (by weight), 2 parts bees wax and 1part pine tar. Melt it in a water bath and pour into jars.

Sheepstallow

Beeswax

Pine tar

Cooling down

Worked fine and smells heavenly......

Warm Easter

We have had extremely nice weather over Easter, warm and sunny with very little wind. So I had time to do some outfitting I did not have time for last year.

Fitted fairleads to the deck, forward and aft, and a brass stem band o protect the boat when I sail her onto the beach.

 

Unwrapping

Yesterday was a beautiful day, sunny, no wind and about +15C, so we decided that spring has come and unwrapped Xiao Feng.

Unpacked the gear, everything survived winter. Oiled the oar leathers and enjoyed the sunshine, while the kids turned Xiao Feng into a pirate ship.

(I do not know why the pictures come out so small..... Blogger iPad app...?)

Stove

I have been starting to think about building a galley box that will fit between the side benches up forward. The first step is to gather up all the stuff that need to fit in the box...

The day before yesterday I recieved my stove, a Trangia 27-8 Duossal. Trangia is a very common camping stove in Sweden, the only thing I do not like about them is that the pots and pans are aluminum that food tend to stick to. There is a non-stick version, but as with all non-stick it wears of with time. So I was very happy when I found some new-old stock of the Duossal version (it was discontinued in 2008 and mine was made in 2001) in an online shop, duossal is a combination material aluminum and stainless steel where the stainless is on the inside so that the food does not stick too much.

The kit contains a frying pan, two pots (one small and one smaller), coffee pot, burner, windshield and a handle for the pots and pan.

Had to take it for a test spin, it boiled one liter of water in about 10 min and fried me an egg...

Boiling water, the whole kit is in the picture.

All packed up

The whole package takes up very little space, the diameter is 18.5cm (8.3 inch) and the height 10cm (3.9 inch) (sorry I do not do 1/8 etc).

Oarlock leather

Needed to do something with the boat despite it is still under cover so I decided to leather the oar locks. My oar locks are galvanized steel so they wear quite a lot on the oar leathers, so now I will have leather rubbing on leather instead.

Making patterns 

Marking on my trusty cow hide

Nailing the holes for the stitches 

All done, now all I need to do is let them dry and grease them a little.

Birch ply

My boat is built out of birch ply, this is quite common in Scandinavia, I have seen boats being both 10 and 20 years (and maybe even 30) old built out of birch ply. Some of them in great shape and some of them in horrible condition. An example from Finland here (http://koti.kapsi.fi/~hvartial/white/white.htm).

Most people nowadays would never build out of birch since it is rot prone, but in my opinion if you find good quality ply and do a proper surface treatment there should be very little problems. My boat is glassed on the bottom and garboard, the rest of the outside is coated with three layers of laminating epoxy (more flexible than glueing epoxy) and painted with two part polyurethane paint, the inside is also painted with the same paint. 

Last week I found a few pieces of ply in my yard, they have been there for about a year and a half, through sunshine, rain, sleet, snow and ice..... They have turned grey but I see no problems with the wood, tried to pull the ply's apart with my hands but was not able to....

Good enough for me!

Another mockup

It seems there are more people thinking about tents this winter, Osbert in Scotland has some great ideas on his blog (http://forthsailoar.osbert.org). He also started a thread (http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?166273-Sprayhood-tent-hoops-from-ply) on the WoodenBoat forum where I found some inspiration from Yeadon (post #33). So I decided to do another mock-up.

Battens/poles sewn into their pockets.

Laid out on the ridge line and pulled down to the gunwale

Not decided yet which version I like best so I will need to think a little more while I am on the lookout for tent poles or acrylic tubing....