September 2001

Last year (2001) around september, my good friend ted said that he was building a plywood sail boat. I was intrigued and found myself searching the web site for some sites on boat building. Boy are there a lot of sites out there for building boats! Just give it a try, search for plywood and boat and you'll get a gazillion hits.

I also went to the library and took out the book that Ted was using, it was "Dynamite" Payson's Instant boat book. Neat book, I oogled at the pictures for many weeks, but didn't really think it was easy to build. Then I found a site that had plans for building a boat from one piece of 1/4 inch plywood. This I can do.

Most of the books and web sites take it for granted that you know a bunch of boat terms. What the hell's a transom (the back side (butt) of the boat)... the above is a transom.

The stem is the front/nose of the boat. It's triangular. In this photo it's very pointy, which was bad. I didn't have enough meat in the stem to screw on the sides of the boat. Here I try to glue it together. It didn't work.

Here's a meatier stem. Easy to screw and glue.

Here's the stern of the boat, complete with glue oozing out of it. I'm clamping the chine logs for the first time, I had to remove these skinny guys and put on some bigger ones. What's that saying, cut twice measure once?

The skeg of the boat. Didn't have plans for this, just carved out what seems to be aero dynamic. Looks a bit like the one on my surf board.

The completely glued boat. No seat or paint yet. But it looks like a boat with just one weekend of work! Yeah.

Of course I'm not going to embarass myself in the park if this sucker sinks like a rock. We first try it out in the swimming pool. It barely floats me an one kid. Look at the back of the boat, 3 more inches of water and we are kissing the bottom of the pool.

Here's the finished boat with sail. The sail is a bit small, but with such a teeny boat, anything larger would surely flip it. Can't wait to build the

wing