The Upright BoatBuild

In the fun-to-immitate tones of Forrest Gump: "Boat-building is ha-aard, Lieutenant Dan."

And while there are more expensive hobbies (flying, deep-sea diving, owning an NBA team), few can fully entertain the imagination as does boat-building.

My skipper has been walking, talking, sleeping, sneezing and bathing in the process. And he's making progress in leaps and bounds.

For the first few weeks of the build, the boat was upside-down. After framing and planking the boat, Jeff went through a repetitive series of steps: putty, sand, putty, sand, putty, sand. Then paint. Followed by more sanding. The result is a smooth, fair* hull. 

A giant step involved the inversion of the boat. While it might seem like a simple task –– just pick it up and turn it over -- the adventure was more like flipping a very big flapjack without a spatula. Minus any interior structure, the hull is a bit floppy and wiggly. 

*Mirror, mirror on the wall? In this case, "fair" means that the hull is symmetrical from side to side and that most bumps and hollows have been smoothed out. Pretty is just a bonus. 

The boat was glued to the floor to start with, so the first step of inverting the boat was to break the beastie free from the box and most of its frames. The application of a 2x4 as a big lever made a lot of cracking sounds, but only a few small splinters. 

Leaving two of the frames in (Station 4 and 8, for those taking note), Jeff and OH and Brent B. each took a grip of a side, heaved, and the boat took flight. Like three skilled pizza dough-thowers, the guys manhandled the boat through a half-somersault and settled it into its "belly pan." (A belly pan being a shaped structure [think nested bowls] under Stations 4 and 8 that cradle the hull so it's level and true.)

While others might have paused to simply admire the workmanship, not my skipper. Next time: bulkheads.