Boat Build: Bulking Up

When last we left the boat-build, the hull was something like a tortilla, held in form by a pair of belly pans while my favorite skipper puttied and filled gaps in the interior surface.  Since a floppy taco of a hull hardly inspires confidence, the next steps involved building structure into the boat.

Enter the bulkhead. I love me some etymology, so ––bulkheads. While there is a military use of the term, the word starts with the Vikings. These nautical types not only handed down some wonderful names for furniture, they were quite interested in carrying home cargo from their travels. 

"Bulki" or "bulkr" means cargo in Old Norse.  

Bulki might also be the name of a fetching little overstuffed Ikea chair, but let's leave that for a moment.

Anyone on a sailboat can tell you how one puff of breeze can send all cargo tumbling to the low side of the boat...which leads to, well, duh: spilled drinks, tipping points, shouting, panic, sinking. To combat gravity, some bright spark thought of slapping up some barricades and corralling things into stalls. (So hey: compartmentalizing IS an excellent coping mechanism!)

On a boat a "head" is the leading edge of things. Head of the sail, head of the mast, etc. And the "heads," as in the lavatory, were off the bow. That's because in the swashbuckling heyday of the British Navy, when this use of the word came into play, the bow was most often the downwind end of the boat. Enough said?

Anyway, bulkhead. Sailors quickly noticed that bulkheads not only kept cargo where it was stowed, they also made the hull sturdier and kept water walled up in the likely event of a leak.  

So the Boat-That-Is-Presently-Nameless got some bulkheads. The bow has a fore-and-aft bulkhead onto which the headstay will be anchored, there's a side-to-side bulkhead that will support a deck-stepped mast, as well as sealing off the bow so that it will be watertight. And a smaller bulkhead at the aft end of the future centerboard trunk will probably host the mainsheet block. 

Alright already, enough words: some photos: