Noel Sharpe

in my defense, I’ve been busy, hellishly busy it seems. What happened, was some inconsiderate B@$%@&! gave me a job. In READING. Reading is of course miles and miles away, so I had to stay there during the week and I was only home at the weekends. It turns out that after a week staying away from home working, I didn’t get much time for boating let alone blogging about boating. At the time, I thought, well it’s only for a couple of months. That was two years and two contracts ago. Ho hum. I can’t say it wasn’t a worthwhile endeavor; I had some fun, made some ash, started two companies, but that’s another blog.

The reason I’m writing is because I have big news. The second boat has a name; first I need to update you on progress so far. As you may know, in my last post I was talking about moving my boat to Wellington, Somerset, and that did happen, but as I was working, I used the easy option of paying someone else for the problem to go away rather than do it my self. It turns out that was a smart move. Boats are HEAVY and difficult to move on dry land. The boat stayed in Wellington for a few months, drying out and having the rotten bits cut off.

As you can see, there was pretty extensive rot damage to the stem which had to be cut off and new bits scarfed in. If anyone is worried for my safety, I should point out that the repaired hull is probably stronger than the original due the the fantastic properties of epoxy.

After a brief sojourn in Wellington, it became necessary to move her to the water side. This will be her penultimate move. The next move will be two crane lifts and into the water. Once again due to “work commitments” I took the easy option and paid the mad scot who moved the boat from the Welsh hills to Wellington to move her again to Millbrook in Cornwall. By the way if anyone is looking for someone to move a boat, I cannot recommend Bob Bain highly enough; he was incredibly accommodating and helpful, did an amazing job and charged an entirely reasonable fee for his careful work. Here is a picture of her being craned into the Southdown Marina yard at Millbrook.

Once installed in the shed in Millbrook, work has made fairly erratic progress. It turns out that marine architects are as dismally optimistic about timescales as the average programmer, and we have been about 400 hours from completion for nearly a year. The erraticness of the progress is largely due to the fact that finding and retaining “talent” for boat building is almost as difficult as in the IT industry. We have had a fair few people through the yard over the past year, and some have done good work only to have their health fail on them during the project. I am delighted to say that we now have two really dedicated members of the team who are doing an outstanding job on the build. Fingers crossed we will be in the water this spring.

The process of boat building is really not much different than building for example, a website. First you start with the vision; maybe sketch out a few ideas on paper. Then you get to wireframing:

Then you add the big structural elements, like er bulkheads beams and that sort of thing:

After that, you start filling in the detail… Okay the analogy is pretty tortuous, I’ll admit, but the thing about deadlines just seemed so familiar to me.

There are hundreds of photos of the build , so please go have a look and comment if you want any details of anything you see there.

The current status of the build is that the hulls are joined together, the decks are all on, the insides are painted out, the bridgedeck saloon is built and the roof is on. If this were a website, we’d be launching it with a “beta” badge, but it’s not. It’s a boat, so it’s not getting wet until it’s finished. How much longer to go? I have no idea. A lot less time than a year ago. A year less in fact. I’m pretty confident that we’ll get her wet this spring, but if it slips to summer, that’s okay too.

I’ll leave you with a couple of images of where we are at with the build and her name; Ellipsis. May Gawd bless her and all those who sail in her.

It’s only 3 o’clock, and already I’ve had a most eventful day. I saved someone from drowning and got adopted by a wild raven. First the drowning thing. I went down to BoSMBSC to check on C#, as we’ve had a lot of really rough weather. I just wanted to make sure that the lines were secure and I also needed to look for a bit that I stupidly left out the day before yesterday.

What happened was I thought I’d go and get the mast raised, but in order to do that, I had to do a couple of things. Firstly I needed to install a sort of wire bracing that goes underneath the middle beam to stiffen it as that is the beam which bears the mast, and then I needed to drill a few holes and mount an aluminium mast step, onto which the mast will slot. While doing the knitting on the brace, a particularly poor squall came in really fast. The weather that day had been fairly disgusting; howling winds F6 – F7, blustery showers, and a certain chill in the air, but the squall that came through was truly terrible, chucking hail and freezing cold rain horizontally at me. Unfortunately, I had not secured the strut by the time the squall hit me, and if I left it like it was, it would surely be lost in the river Brue for ever, so I made it fast as quickly as I could, and secured the hatches on C#. Now drenched, I forgot all about the mast step I had carefully laid out, ready for fixing to the beam, and fled back to the club house. I have to say that even though C# was firmly tied to the pontoons, and land was but a few metres away, watching that weather roll in filled me with fear, not the bad fear that paralyses you, but the fear that makes you feel alive and catalyses you into action. I can’t wait to have c# ready to sail. Anyway after a warm beverage I had completely forgotten the mast step. I had planned to stay on in the evening for the social, but I was cold and drenched, so I decided to go home. About 5 minutes before I got back, I remember the step – damn. I called the club and asked someone to have a look for the part for me, but they could not find it.

So that was the reason for the other reason for the visit today. Karen and ‘Ella came with me, and had a turn on the boat while it was tied up. Karen did not throw up. That is good. Baby steps. You never know, one day she may even come sailing with me. Karen wanted to have a small photo opportunity on the boat, so she got into the port hull, and while I held ‘Ella on the pontoons, I heard a shout. I did not hear clearly what was shouted, but a shout came again: “HELP!”. Now I had ‘Ella in my arms and Karen was still in the port hull, but the shout sounded desperate, so I ran towards the shout rather than wait for Karen to come and take ‘Ella so I could at least assess the situation and help if possible with one hand. I did not see him immediately as he was not where I was expecting to see anyone, but I saw him soon enough. Pete, another BoS sailer, was clinging onto the mooring lines of Matilda, fully immersed in the water. Karen had caught up by now, so I put ‘Ella down on the pontoons, and hauled Pete out. He was none the worse for wear, apart from being a bit cold and slightly shocked. What had happened was that he had been tugging on his boat’s mooring line, and the current had pulled his boat which had pulled him in. Moral of the story is: Wear a life jacket – even if you are “only” going on the pontoons. Grief I sound like a grandpa, but seriously wear a life jacket. Hey I can talk, I don’t even /have/ a life jacket yet. Well that’s not exactly true as the very generous Ted Tratt gave me one today. It does have one fairly serious flaw: unbeknownst to Ted, the life jacket failed to hold any air. The two manual inflation tubes are loose and air leaks straight past them. I shall have to see if they are repairable, as it’s a pretty swanky auto inflation number which costs a bomb new.

The other thing that happened was that a juvenile Raven appeared at Devyn and ‘Ella’s window It was sitting on the satellite dish sort of eyeing us out. It looked very interested. I was trying to be very gentle to avoid frightening it, but it seems that I should not have bothered. This bird was far from timid. It was a brazen charlatan, and as soon as the window was opened, it was trying to find a way in. It succeeded, and decided that I would make a very good perch. It sat on my shoulder for ages, so I decided to take it downstairs to release it. I held it carefully to prevent it from flying off around the house, and took it into the lounge. When the bird saw my daughter ‘Ella, it went nuts, and let out a really loud craaaw. ‘Ella was having a snack of bread and raisins, and I figured that the bird fancied trying a few of the raisins. It loved them snatching them from my hand as soon as it was within range. We then took the bird to the Kitchen, and here you can see it having a bit of apple from my hand. Karen prepared the raven a delicious snack of apple, banana, raisins, corn flakes, bits of bread, and put then in a small box. The bird was now sitting on my shoulders eating from my hands. What a glutton. After all that food, I thought it would probably like to have a drink, so Karen got it a glass of water. This little bird probably thought it was on it’s father’s yacht! It was loving it.
After each dunk in the glass the bird would hold it’s head up like this: as if it were gargling. It really was excellent humour.
Before long the bird became bored of all the food and drink, so started to raid our living room for anything interesting. It found a green pencil with a shiny eraser head, gave a mad squawk, left my shoulder to pick it up and flew off to the kitchen to escape with it’s prize. The bird really was endearing. Anyway one of our cats ate it.

Only kidding, we set it free outside, and after hanging around for about half an hour, and filling it’s face from the fruit we placed on the wall, it disappeared. Karen is going to keep putting some bits out for it, perhaps it will become a regular visitor over the winter.
You can see higher resolution images of the whole event here