Building Ravn: a 19-foot faering

The Best Wife Ever!

2012-01-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

That's right bitches, I'm married to the most amazing woman on the planet. Eat your heart out.

My wife calls the sock that fits over the dragon head the "hostage hood."

Even though she lives in another state, my wife was able to make a pattern (with the help of Doryman's wife, Mary), buy exactly the right acrylic canvas (perfect color too), sew a huge cover that was almost a perfect fit the first time we tried it on, and put it under the Christmas tree and make it a complete surprise to me. I must admit, surprising me about anything is not a great feat; I usually have my head in the clouds (the less charitable would say another place). But the rest of it was impressive: this cover is truly a work of art!

I knew I wanted and needed a cover for the boat, but I had no clue how it could be done. My wife designed the cover so well that I can put the hood over the dragon head, unroll it the length of the boat and put a smaller hood over the stern stem and the cover is stretched perfectly down the middle. Then it's a simple matter to tie it down and I'm ready to hit the road. The stitching is very professional, even though she often had to sew through three and four layers of fabric. There are no raw edges anywhere.

The only thing I can take credit for was setting a few grommets, which is a pretty fun job.

I had an acrylic canvas cover on my Chamberlain dory that worked perfectly (also made by my wife). It was in very good shape when I sold the boat after eight years of service -- all of it outdoors. It looked like it could have easily made it another eight or 10 years.

Here's hoping this one will last as long, because it is a thing of beauty, like my wife.

Kelly wants to build a faering

2012-01-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

I need more tension on the luff, but it was my second sail.

Kelly, from Kerrville, Texas, is thinking about building a faering to sail and row primarily in a wide, deadwater river area with submerged cypress stumps. He wrote me with a couple of questions.

"I believe the length of Atkin's plan is preferable to 16'6'' in Oughtred's Elfyn design. However, Atkin's plan is described as finishing at 600 lbs. Understanding that includes lead ballast, more meat in the keel, and so on, I'm concerned about draft. Oughtred's plan says it finishes around 150 lbs."

A friend of mine, John Kohnen, told me Atkin said in one article the boat would weigh 600 pounds. In another he said it should weigh 450. I need to find a truck scale near a place with a boat ramp so I can weigh mine. My guess is that it would be closer to 450. Although I'm a belt and suspenders kind of builder who tends to overbuild things, I tried to rein myself in during Ravn's construction.

The design calls for 106 pounds of lead in the keel and I put in 98 pounds, according to my bathroom scale. I used purple heart wood for the keel, which is pretty heavy and with my tendency to overbuild, I thought I'd knock off a few pounds so I wouldn't come in too heavy. As far as I can tell, she floats right on her lines, so I think I succeeded.

I would not leave out the lead. The lines of the Valgerda are, according to Atkin, taken right off a Hardanger Fjord faering. Traditional boats built with modern methods (stitch and glue or glued lapstrake) usually end up lighter than the original. I think this would be true of Valgerda. If she didn't have the additional lead in the keel, you would have to add ballast inside to bring her down to her lines. I don't like the idea of lead pigs (or rocks) sliding around in the bilge. Were I to have inside ballast, I think I'd use sand bags, but that would be a hassle too.

I made the keel six inches shallower than on the plan making the draft about 12 inches instead of 18. I also gave her a little more skeg than Atkin drew. My reasons for these changes were these: I wanted shallower draft to make her easier to get on and off a trailer and because my primary cruising grounds include the beautiful coastal rivers of Oregon. The shallow bars require a shallow draft and good directional stability when you are on top of a wave (hence the increased skeg area). Beaching is easier too with less keel. Another possible advantage is a little less wetted surface, which would make her easier to row and may provide a little advantage in light air.

The only down side to the changes is that the deeper keel that Atkin drew should - theoretically - go to windward better. If you want a boat that you can tack upwind in a narrow channel, Valgerda is not your girl, even with the deeper keel configuration. In that situation, I drop the sail and row. That said, I am happy with my boat's windward performance: she is close winded, won't stall in a tack if you have enough way on and the right tension on the luff rope, and if she makes any leeway it's too little to notice.

An East Coast builder, Rick Nardone, built a Valgerda about the same time I built Ravn. He eliminated Atkin's fin keel too, opting to return to the more traditional faering keel, which is about four inches deep. His boat draws about 10 inches. Rick's been a real busy guy and I've only received one rowing report from him, so I don't know how she sails. That's another approach you might consider. (I think his boat may be for sale, by the way, if you want to skip the hassle of building a boat.)

I agree with you that Oughtred's faerings seem short. Modern Norwegian faerings are 18 or 19 feet long and the older ones, like the one buried with the Osberg ship, were more like 22 feet. Oughtred's
Arctic Tern and Ness Yawl designs are the length I would consider, but there's something I really like about the three-strake faerings.

If, however, you decide you want something lighter or with a centerboard, by all means go with an Oughtred design. They are beautiful boats and, by all accounts, stellar performers. DO NOT put a centerboard in the Valgerda. I think that would really mess the boat up for little gain and a lot of unnecessary complication.

"Also, I'm curious as to whether or not you considered building in solid wood. After pursuing many boatbuilding sites now, I nearly have the impression that building a traditional craft in traditional style is less work than modern plywood and epoxy. Not that simple, I'm sure."

By no means is building in solid timber easier. It takes more esoteric skill, is less forgiving and materials are harder to come by. (To build Valgerda, for instance, you would need board 22-inches wide and about 20 feet long for the mid-plank. Good luck finding that!) Then, once you have her built, the fun really begins. A traditionally-built faering needs to spend its life in the water or out of the sun and dry wind in a boat shed. Keeping a traditionally-built faering on a trailer - especially in a dry, hot place - would simply kill it.

Adrian Morgan, a boatbuilder in Scottland, built an all-wood version of one of Oughtred's faerings. Check out his blog and web site.

Now, about Kelly's shallow lake with sumps: I built my boat with just such conditions in mind. Where I sail there are lots of rocks just under the surface and plenty of deadheads too. I haven't had any collisions yet, but I put a double layer of 6-ounce fiberglass cloth below the waterline and built my keel and stems extra tough out of purple heart. I'm confident she could take a pretty good hit.

I don't think Kelly could go wrong with Valgerda or an Oughtred design. I told him another design he might consider is the Sellway-Fisher Kari 2.

The important thing is to build one. I hope I can post photos of his progress here soon. The world needs more faerings!

November sail

2011-11-19T20:48:00.000-08:00

Trouble the Sailor Dog on watch.

I was hoping Saturday would provide a break in the storms that hammered the coast this week and I got my wish. The rain and winds abated leaving filtered sunshine and a light breeze in their wake.

Devils Lake is only a few minutes from my house. It's a beautiful lake and I had it all to myself, unlike during the summer. The north wind was light but steady, giving me a chance to further explore Ravn's windward ability. With the proper amount of luff tension she goes to windward just fine thank you. No racing dingy, but she will make progress to windward.

She's well behaved on other points of sail as well. Ghosting down wind, Trouble the Sailor Dog and I got close to a large flock of ducks who were using the lake as a rest stop before flying farther south.

Made the dock without touching the oars.

As the sun set I headed for the dock. The wind all but died as I passed a point to windward and Ravn ghosted alongside the dock.

Trouble and I stepped off with no fuss or muss to an audience of none but waterfowl. Where are the people when you do something slick?

Salmon River messabout

2011-09-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

A fellow Coot from California stopped on his way to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival to experience a row on the Salmon River.

Rick rowing his Walkabout.

Rick Thompson brought his beautifully-made Walkabout, a boat designed for rowing by John Wellsford. Wellsford was a featured speaker at the festival this year, which inspired many boat owners with Wellford designs to show up with their boats to what is one of the oldest wooden boat shows in the nation.

Rick and his wife took their time wending their way up the coast from their home near San Francisco to Port Townsend, Wash. He emailed me and said he wanted to experience rowing one of Oregon's coastal rivers. The Salmon did not disappoint.

My wife enjoying the fine weather with Trouble, our dog.

The weather was beautiful - sunny and calm - and the tide that afternoon was mellow with only a three-foot exchange. My wife, who is skeptical of boating trips on the Salmon River from years of experiencing wind-tunnel conditions there, took a stocking cap and coat and, amazing to her, didn't need them.

Rick rowing out to take a close look at the bar.

The water was clear (in contrast to what Rick was used to rowing on the Sacramento River delta) and the wildlife was abundant. Shore birds and water birds of all kinds greeted us and harbor seals followed our boats like curious puppies. A large herd of Roosevelt elk grazed in an open patch above us on Cascade Head. It was a sight we almost missed because we were so busy admiring the two beautiful boats pulled up on the deserted beach.

Six-foot ocean waves kept us in the river and on the beach for the most part, but Rick ventured a little too close to the breaking bar and a wave climbed over his stern and into his cockpit. His Walkabout handled it well and he was able to sponge out the water between strokes on the quiet row back to the boat launch.

Ravn is the People's Choice

2011-09-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Bob, Clair, Doryman and me rowing.

The seventh annual Toledo Wooden Boat Show in August was a fun event for several reasons: it marked the one-year anniversary since launching Ravn, it was the first time rowing Ravn with four rowers and Ravn won the People's Choice award.

Doryman is one of the mainsprings of this event and keeps very busy before, during and after the show. One of his most pleasant duties this year was playing host to Bob and Claire McDonald, a wonderful couple from Spokane who recently donated their Teak Lady sloop to the Port of Toledo. Now the port has a matched set.

Doryman and I discuss seating before the row.

During dinner Saturday night Bob and Claire, who are at the aft end of their mid 80s, recounted their adventures rowing nearly every morning on the Spokane River. Bob said he wished he could row at the festival. This matched up with one of my wishes -- rowing Ravn with four rowers. Sunday morning both wishes came true.

Mary, Doryman's lovely wife, put together a great video of Ravn with four rowers. Many thanks to Mary, who also took the pictures in this post. I had my camera with me, but I didn't use it much.

The major award.

Return to Hope

2011-07-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ravn with Mount Rainier in the background.

In July, my family mounted an expedition to Hope Island, a small island not far from Olympia, Washington. It was a fulfillment of a dream that kept me going during the long months I was building Ravn. I would imagine my family on a sparkling summer day, sailing on a gentle breeze to this storybook island to picnic and enjoy her beauty. The reality turned out even better than the dream.

I hauled Ravn on her trailer the 200 miles from my home to Olympia where most of my children, grandchildren and my wife live. Ravn is very easy to tow behind my little pickup and I hardly noticed she was there. Other people on the highway noticed her, however, and I received several thumbs up from other motorists. Trailering the boat added about 15 minutes to the four-hour trip and upped my gas consumption by about a third. But it was worth it.

About 20 years ago Washington State purchased the 106-acre Hope Island and turned it into a state park. I worked for The Olympian newspaper at the time and wrote a series of articles about the island. My family and I visited the island several times when we had our big sailboat Lobo. The island has a special place in the heart and history of my family.

The natives paddled their traditional craft made of fiberglass walrus hides.

We launched from Boston Harbor, which is just a few miles north of Olympia. My wife, daughter, her two kids and I were in Ravn. My oldest son, his daughter and his girlfriend rented kayaks at the marina making it a grand fleet.

My daughter also loves rowing.

The trip to the island took a little over an hour with my daughter and I rowing most of the way until a light breeze took us the rest of the way to the island. We saw seals, harbor porpoise and many huge jellyfish on the way.

We nosed up onto a deserted, rocky beach and I held the bow while everyone clamored over the foredeck an onto the beach, all without getting their feet wet. I was proud of that achievement, but it didn't last long; the kids were soon wet up to their knees and beyond.

I wasn't watching the tide and Ravn dried out.

The tides in this part of the world have about a 10-foot range. With all the picnicking, exploring and visiting I was not paying attention to the boat. I finally glanced over at her and found the tide left her high and dry. I had to drag her over barnacle-encrusted stones the size of my fist to get her afloat again. At about 650 pounds, she's a lot to move by yourself, but not too difficult.

My grandson watching for harbor porpoises.

The sail back to Boston Harbor was a pure joy. The wind was a little fluky at first, but soon filled in and Ravn moved easily along while the kids played. My granddaughter found a sponge and busied herself cleaning the boat. It was short on cleaning value, but long indeed on entertainment value. Once she tired of that, she joined her brother on the foredeck to watch for seals and jellyfish. I remembered that as I was building the deck two winters ago I envisioned just such a scene and it made a perfect day even better.

Sailing at last!

2011-04-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

My wife and I had Wednesday off and it wasn't raining, so we took Ravn for her inaugural sail. It was great!

She (the boat) behaved like a lady, moving smartly under her small standing lug sail.

I know what all you sailors are asking: "Does she go to windward?" The answer is, I think so. The wind was 10 to 15 knots but the hills and valleys caused it to clock around 180 degrees in 100 yards, so by the time we made it through a tack, the wind was from a completely different direction. I also didn't have a downhaul rigged until about the last 20 minutes of the sail. I think once I get her tuned, she will go to windward, after a fashion, just as Atkin said.

She really shines on a reach and a run.

Yes, it was that cold, but still a great sail.

Depoe Bay Wooden Boat Show

2011-04-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last weekend the little coastal village of Depoe Bay, Oregon, put on it's annual Wooden Boat Show. Ravn was one of the attractions.

A Pacific storm blew through the day before with gale-force winds and constant rain. Here on the Oregon coast the only real rain storm is horizontal rain. Saturday dawned calm, cool and cloudy but the forecast was for no rain and it held through the weekend.

Depoe Bay claims to be the world's smallest harbor and I've never seen a smaller one, so maybe it's true. It's secure: protected from wind and wave by huge basalt cliffs with a small entrance called the Hole in the Wall.

I was hoping to take Ravn on her inaugural sail before the show to work the bugs out, but the Pacific storm prevented that. With the confined space, fluky winds, strange tidal currents and an audience, I decided to postpone that event. This week, for sure!

I didn't take many pictures. For a good slide show and a video of events at the show go to my friend Doryman's blog.

Rudder and tiller

2011-04-18T16:58:00.000-07:00

Since I changed the keel on Mr. Atkin's design I needed to change the rudder too. I did try and keep the area about the same, which makes for a big rudder. It also significantly increases the draft, but only when under sail.

I made the rudder from a beautiful piece of mahogany that was 23 inches wide. It was a gift from my carving teacher after I helped her move. I kept cutting on the shape until it looked about right. Then I rounded the leading edge and feathered the trailing edge.

After I finalized the shape and attached the two cheek pieces, I decided to add a little carving to memorialize the skill my carving teacher passed on to me. I found the scroll and leaf shape amongst a much more complicated Viking-era carving. It seemed a perfect complement to the graceful shape of the rudder head.

The rudder is pretty quick to rig, with the rudder hardware from Duck Trap Woodworking. I thought it might be difficult to do at the dock, but it is, in fact, easier than while the boat is on dry land. The buoyancy of the rudder helps. You can hold it with one hand and drop the pin in with the other.

The push-pull style tiller and reach arm are made from ash. The reach arm has a through tenon that goes in a mortise in the rudder head and is held in place with a wedge in a mortise of the reach arm. The wedge has a marline keeper on it, but I made an extra wedge just in case. The reach arm is seized to the tiller with more marline, which I tarred with Stockholm tar. The tiller is about four inches longer (74 inches) than in the plan. I figured I could cut it down if the extra length isn't needed.

Sail ho!

2011-03-02T21:32:00.001-08:00

I hoisted sail today for the first time on Ravn. I did it while she was still on the trailer; a true dry run.

The spars and running rigging are done, except for a few final touches. Eventually I'll get some proper three-braid rope for the sheet and halyard, but the old stuff from my box o' rope will do for now.

I moved the shrouds and forestay below the halyard shive and I think that was a good decision. Nothing looks like it will bind up as long as the Jack Tar hoisting the main doesn't two-block it.

As I was building Ravn I considered all kinds of changes to the rig: upping the scantlings of the mast and going with an unstayed, ballanced lug was one I seriously considered. But then I was lucky enough to score a sail from another Valgerda, so I decided to follow Mr. Atkin's plan exactly.

Were I to order or make a sail I would have been temped to make it larger and out of tanbark cloth. In a way I'm glad those decisions were taken away. She looks real good to me just the way she is.

Now I need to get a rudder made so I can see how that beautiful rig performs.

Questions from Victor and an Offer to Followers

2011-02-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot of Ravn's bow before I turned her over. Notice the hollow entry and flare in the bow. When I was lofting the O station I almost messed this up. But I caught the mistake in time.

I started to answer a question from a reader and got a little long, so I decided to make a post of it. Victor writes:

I am seriously considering building a Valgerda. I think this boat is one of the most beautiful and authentic looking faerings around, (apart from the traditionally built ones of course!). Unfortunately building one (traditionally) with solid lumber is not an option for me.

I am a bit apprehensive about all that lofting. Which reminds me, both you and Rick Nardone mention an error with Mr Atkin's offsets , can you elaborate on this please? Did you find that the offsets given were relatively close after fairing the lines?

Is this boat "a handful" to row?

-Victor

Dear Victor,

I hope you do build a Valgerda. They are wonderful boats and rowing one is almost a religous experience.

While I don't consider myself an expert rower, I have rowed a lot of different boats and Ravn is far and away my favorite. She is a big boat, but far from being a handful to row, she is very well behaved. One person can row her with no problem. She tracks like she's on rails and has the good sense to punch through the small waves and ride over the big ones. I built her so she could cross the shallow river bars we have on the Oregon coast and she does that like a pro.

She does not handle like a light, flat-bottomed boat -- don't expect to do a 360 in her length -- but you also won't get dumped off a breaking wave and broach like happened to me in my little dory.

Both Rick Nardone and I built the keel different from the plans. My keel is 6 1/2-inches deep, which makes my boat draw about 12 inches. Rick's is about four inches, with a total draft of about 10 inches. The keel Mr. Atkin drew is more than 18 inches, which would pose a problem launching and recovering her from a trailer. I find Ravn to be very handy in that respect. She isn't much more difficult to launch and recover than my little 13-foot, 150-pound Chamberlain dory.

Now about the lofting: Rick said the lofting was easy and a good project for a beginner. He's a professional boat builder and knows what he's doing. This is the first and only boat I've ever lofted so it was a bit of a challenge for me, but only because I'm not good at all with numbers. I found Mr. Atkin's table of offsets to be right on the money as far as I could tell.

The mistake I made was by not following exactly the lofting of the 0 and 12 station (the first and last ones). It didn't look right to me because it tucked in more than I thought it should so I modified it. Once I set up the stations I saw my mistake and corrected it with no harm done. Had I not fixed the mistake, Ravn wouldn't have the beautiful hollow entry she has.

The Offer

I found it was easier for me to make up my own table and translate the traditional feet-inches-and eighths into exactly what that looks like on a tape measure. I know, it's kindergarten stuff, but, like I said, I'm not a numbers guy. I have that as a doc. file and would be happy to sent it to any of those who follow this blog if they can prove they have already purchased the plans from Mrs. Atkin. The plans are a beautiful piece of art. If you are building this boat you need to have them. Besides, I wouldn't want to cheat Mrs. Atkin. At $50 the plans for Valgerda are a bargain. She is providing a great service making the Atkin plan catalog available to boat builders.

Tim Mooney's experience with Valgerda

2011-02-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

There is a great post from the archives of the Wooden Boat Forum, Sept. 21, 2004, by Tim Mooney . He talks about the Valgerda that he built:

"Well, here's what I think. I built one of these Valgerda boats, and sailed it from Mystic to Annisquam, MA; up the coast of Maine and in the Great Lakes. I lived aboard for up to six weeks at a time and I think the boat is great. The rig is great. and the ballast is great. No you don't row this boat to windward. No you don't want to sail her unballasted (flotation is a good idea).
This is the driest small boat I've ever been on. I know why the Norwegians use the verb swims, as in "she swims well," to describe their craft; if you get wet sailing to windward in under 15 knots of wind in open water it is because of gross inattention misdirecting the tiller. Normally she seems to try to attack waves like she knows where she wants to go and the spray stays down low. The rig may not look like much to you, but sailing I liked it. I added 8" to both luff and leach and had two deep reefs; wouldn't change anything else. I wouldn't want a less high aspect sail, since I like getting to weather.

"Since there is a keel and the center thwart is not structural, I'd take it out, stick it in the back with the furled rig, the oar that wasn't holding up my tent and live with a big comfortable space. I could go on. I love this boat. I had the most fun of my life with her."

April 1, 2011
I did ask Mr. Mooney if I could post this before I actually posted it, no foolin'. The thing is, I didn't hear back from him for some weeks, so I went ahead and posted it anyway.

Lucky for me that I received the gracious email a couple of days ago: "No problem using my old forum post. I sometimes think of writing more about the boat. -- Tim Mooney"

I immediately wrote back thanking him and asking for more recollections of his Valgerda and photos. Here's hoping!

Other Valgerdas

2011-02-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

Doryman's Valgerda at the Toledo Wooden Boat Show last August.

I correspond regularly with two other Valgerda owners - Doryman, who lives just down the coast, and Rick, who lives on the other coast - and I'd like to add to the list.

There must be more; the design has been around since 1952. John Kohnen snapped a few pictures of two different Valgerdas at recent Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festivals. I also saw one for sale on the East Coast a few years ago. It would be nice to have a list of builders, owners or former owners.

Heck, I'd even like to talk to folks who have just sailed or rowed one. Or even people who are thinking of building one.

I'd also like to talk to owners and builders of Kari 2, the Selway-Fisher faering of about the same size and style. I own a set of plans for this boat and almost built it, but the Atkin plan won out.

So, if you fit any of the above categories please let me know through the comment section of this blog. I would like this to be a place where we can share stories and ideas about this great design.

Rick's Valgerda

Trouble on deck!

2011-01-22T21:08:00.000-08:00

OK, it's not as bad as it sounds. Trouble is my 3-year-old Australian Shepard. Having her on the stern deck was an improvement from her running from port to starboard and back to port. Once she got up where she could survey the lake she settled right down.

I should have spent the day in the shop working on the spars and rigging, but you just don't get many days like this in January. The sun felt good and was too hot for anything more than a t-shirt.

Once I got back and washed down the boat, I fitted the mast. All is well, but I do need to enlarge the hole in the floor boards where the mast passes though. I needed to pull the boat out of the shop to do that anyway. Right?

Ravn's New (Old) Mast

2011-01-17T05:11:00.001-08:00

Back in August I bought some nice old-growth fir for Ravn's mast with enough left over for a set of oars. I built the oars first and I'm glad I did. This is wonderful wood, don't get me wrong. It was air-dried for 10 years and is perfectly clear with tight growth rings. But the stuff is heavy. It will work fine as oars, once I shave them down a bit more to improve the balance, but it was just too heavy to make the mast.

Enter Doryman. Doryman, who writes the best small-craft blog on the web, only lives about 40 miles from my house and about 10 miles from where I work. He is a fellow Coot. Over the past couple of years he has turned from a virtual friend on the web to a real friend in real life.

Among his fleet of sailboats and pulling boats is a Valgerda. His boat, the Reinsdyr, was built in 1966 by Keeler Boat Building of Portland, Oregon, for the Weyerhaeuser family. If you live in the Northwest, you know Weyerhaeuser as a giant and successful forest products company. My guess is that the Weyerhaeuser family could buy just about any kind of boat they wanted and it pleases me to think that they chose the Valgerda design to purchase.

The boat is built to very high standards and is heavy, with three-eighth-inch plywood planking, decks on the sides bow and stern, rudder hardware that is stout enough for a 40-footer and, until recently, an inboard gas engine. When Doryman bought the boat the engine had been removed, but the boat is still quite a bit heavier than its designed weight of 600 pounds.

Until May 2010, John Kohnen, another Coot and keeper of the Atkin web site, owned the boat. John came with two other Coots to help me when I turned the boat over. I knew he had a Valgerda. One thing led to another and I bought Reinsdyr's sail a month or so after the boat turning.

Doryman purchased the boat from John. He worked hard to get it ready for the Toledo Wooden Boat Show and it really looked great! With fresh coats of paint and varnish you can see why the Weyerhaeuser family bought this little yacht.

During the Toledo show, both boats were tied up at the same dock offering people to compare the two now very different boats. Doryman ribbed me a little about taking the sail from "his" boat, but said that because his boat is so much heavier he wanted to increase the size of the sail.

He recently took delivery of a beautiful new sail made by a Eugene sail maker. At 119 square feet, his new sail is more than half again larger than the original. Needless to say the 14-foot mast on his Valgerda would not accommodate this cloud of canvas. Lucky me.

I went to Doryman's house bearing gifts and managed a trade. I think it wasn't so much the quality of my trade goods as the fact that Doryman wanted the mast to go to a good home. As he said, "the mast ought to go with the sail."

The mast is made to the exact dimensions from Atkin's plan. The only exception -- and it's a nice one -- is a finely-formed button at the truck. There's a beautiful bronze sheave for the halyard too. Doryman put a lot of work into the mast: scraping it to bare wood, filling a groove that held the wire for a masthead light and priming the whole thing with epoxy. Like everything Doryman does -- from writing his blog to building boats -- the workmanship was excellent.

A little epoxy got in the halyard slot freezing up the sheave, but I was able to work it free. The bottom 30 inches or so of the mast was left square, which won't work on Ravn. So I am in the process of rounding that section and I cut a tenon in in the bottom to fit my mast step.

This has reinvigorated my efforts to get Ravn sailing. Thanks Doryman!

New Year's Row

2011-01-15T18:44:00.000-08:00

Ravn and Paku waiting to be loaded onto trailers.

I know I'm a little slow on this post - like two weeks - but I need to write it so I can write the post I really want to write.

My wife and I had an enjoyable, but cold, row on New Year's Day. It was another drift down the Yaquina River. This time my wife didn't have to work so she was able to occupy the princess seat. In stead of a full codgery of Coots, only one other vessel accompanied us: Doryman and his wife, Mary, rowed their beautiful Culler skiff Paku.

Mary and my wife have many similar interests (yarn, knitting, violins and other stuff). Doryman and I often get together to "play boats" with his fleet of small craft. The Doryman has only about seven boats at the moment, but that number can and does change with alarming frequency. All his boats are made of wood and have either been extensively restored or built from scratch by Doryman. Some are even his own designs. If that weren't enough, he is also the current international president of the Traditional Small Craft Association.

In all, an interesting couple. Needless to say, we did a lot more talking than rowing. That was OK, however, because Doryman planned the outing so the ebb tide and the river's current gave us a two-knot, or better, push down the river. How could an outing like this get any better? Food and even more conversation, which is how we ended the day in a great little BBQ restaurant in Toledo. Thanks Mary and Doryman!

Rowin' on the River

2010-10-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

As I hitched up the boat I could hear the surf pummeling the Oregon Coast even though my house is more than a half mile from the beach. This weekend the storm-warning flags flew for the first time in months. Driving south along the coast highway the wind buffeted Ravn on the trailer.

I picked up my friend, Scott, in Newport. He brought his fishing pole and net because the salmon are running up the Yaquina River. Both of us brought our foul-weather gear.

As we drove east the wind abated, but the sky was a threatening rain. We got to Elk City around 1 p.m. to total calm and no rain, conditions that would persist until about the last mile of our row. Nine other boats were there from the Western Oregon Messabouts (the Coots) -- 14 other Coots and spouses. it was an interesting group of boats that included a Bogler Light Schooner, two canoes, a Puddle Duck Racer, a Footloose Skiff designed by Warren Jordan, a Pete Culler Good Little Skiff and a Paul Gartside Riff.

We rowed six miles down the river on a falling tide that sometimes gave us as much as a two-knot push. The salmon were jumping and rolling all along the six miles of river, but Scott didn't get a bite. Only one other boat we passed caught one and it was dark (past its prime), they said.

I rowed most of the way while Scott fished. He did try out the new oars and agreed with me that they could stand to have more wood removed from the shaft between the leathers and the blade. We rowed double for a while: four oars first, then we both sat on the same thwart and rowed one oar each. The surprising thing was that we seemed to go as fast each rowing one oar as we did under four oars. What will it be like with four rowers!?

The weather was very nice for late October, no wind or rain and about 60 degrees. Then, about a mile from our goal, a gust of wind so sudden and strong that it took your breath away struck us and it started to pour. Everyone was ready with the rain gear and no one looked too uncomfortable, but we were all ready to get out by the time we reached the Quarry Boat Launch.

Mary, who organized the event with her husband Michael (a.k.a. Doryman), ferried the drivers back to their towing rigs. Once back at the boat launch, many helpers made loading the 10 boats a quick operation.

We then went to Pigfeathers, a great little BBQ joint in Toledo. The food, the company and the service was awesome! A nice end to a great rowing event!

For more (and better) photos got to Doryman's blog and John Kohnen's photos.

New oars!

2010-10-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished the 10-foot pair of oars I've been working on for the past five weeks or so. Gluing up the blanks was a bit of a pain, so I dilly dallied around, putting off the parts I didn't like. After the glue up, the project went quickly.

I enjoy working with draw knives and spokeshaves and soon I was ankle deep in shavings. My Stanley No. 40 scrub plane and my Stanley No. 3 small smooth plane came in handy as well. Both these planes are more than 100 years old and work every bit as well now as they did when they were made. I suspect the 10-inch draw knife and the two spokeshaves are at least close to the same age, but Stanley planes are much easier to date because of the changes in the Stanley logo and the innovations the company made to their planes.

I used Douglas fir because I couldn't find spruce of the right size. As I was finishing up this pair a friend suggested that Port Orford cedar would be another good wood for oars, and I have no doubt he's right, but that's another difficult wood to find. The oars turned out heavier than I wanted, but they seem to be well balanced.

I used a pair of Norwegian oars that are more than 50 years old as my guide. These are the most beautiful set of oars I've ever seen. I just wish they were long enough, but, alas, they are only eight feet long.

I will see how well they work tomorrow on a 10-mile row from Elk City to Toledo, Ore., on the Yaquina River. My friend, Scott, who loaned me his 9-foot oars, is coming with me. This is a Western Oregon Messabouts/Traditional Small Craft Association event. The weather is not shaping up all that great - looks like we will have wind and rain - but the tide will be in our favor. A spring tide should give us about a two-and-a-half knot push. Afterwards we are eating BBQ at Pigfeathers, a great little restaurant across from the Toledo City Docks.

A row with neighbors

2010-10-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

On Columbus Day I took my neighbors out for a row on the lake near our homes. I wanted to repay Ray for all the help he gave me during the building of Ravn. I also wanted to see how she would perform with four adults on board.

The weather was beautiful -- sunny with a slight breeze. I brought my 8-foot oars as well as the 9-footers I'm borrowing from a friend. Both Ray and I rowed and she move smartly along. Both our wives were in the princess seat and everyone had plenty of room. The boat was amazingly stable, which is great when you are loading and unloading folks who are not used to being around small boats. We all agreed after the row that we could have had a couple of grandkids in the boat without overcrowding the boat.

Meantime, I'm almost finished with the final shaping of the 10-foot oars I'm working on. And across the country Rick launched his Valgerda on Columbus Day.

Ravn Rows in the Ocean

2010-09-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

With the good weather quickly coming to an end here on the Oregon coast, I often forgo working on the boat to go out for a quick row. Last week my brother was in town and I took him rowing on the Salmon River and crossed a breaking bar out into the wide Pacific. With a four-foot swell and a fresh breeze Ravn was truly in her element. The photo shows the mouth of the Salmon River with Cascade Head in the background.

Ravn did what few boats can do of any size and that's to cross a shallow river bar with breaking seas. At no time did I feel like the boat was out of control or that we were in danger. This is what these boats were built for and centuries of refinement have made them very good at it. She tracked like she was on rails, even when we were on top of the breaking waves. It was nice having my brother there to direct me over the bar. You need a set of eyes looking looking fore and aft to negotiate such a maneuver. It would have been nicer still to have had a second set of oars for him to use, so instead of directing he could have rowed facing forward while sitting on the stern thwart. The added thrust would have been nice, but not essential.

Once we were out on the ocean we fished near some off-shore rocks. The boat held station like she had a parking break. There is a lot of boat below the waterline, even though I have opted for less keel than Mr. Atkin drew. Both my brother and I moved around the boat at will. This boat is very stable. It feels more like a 25-foot keel boat and not at all like a dingy.

After a couple hours of fishing (not catching, by the way) we came back across the bar and found a nice little beach inside the river's mouth to eat our lunch. My brother again proved his worth by guiding me between some suitcase-sized rocks until Ravn's bow slid up on the beach. I jumped out first (I had on rubber boots) and held the bow. My brother, in street shoes, was able to step off the bow onto dry beach. Another good reason to go with the a shallow keel.

I thought Ravn would be a lot less handy than her predecessor, a 13.5-foot Chamberlain dory. She is about three times as heavy, draws about eight more inches and is five feet longer. In other words, she's a lot more boat. I thought that would make her harder to launch and recover and harder to tow behind my little four-cylinder truck. I have not found that to be the case. It takes about the same time and effort to launch and recover the boat and I hardly notice I'm towing anything when I have her hitched up. While I generally agree with the old saw that the smaller the boat the more you use it. that's not my experience with Ravn. From the time I get it in my head that "Hey, I should go for a quick row," to when I'm actually rowing on the lake near my house is about 10 minutes. That's the same amount of time it took with my little dory. And, because this boat is so much more capable and seaworthy, I know I will use it more.

Ravn's Rowing Report

2010-09-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

Since launching Ravn Aug. 21 I've taken her rowing four times and I'm happy to report that, true to her Viking heritage, she handles like a dream under oars. There's no question that she has some weight when you take that first pull, but the extra glide seems to more than make up for it. She also just brushes off small waves.

The other thing I'm really pleased about is how stable she is. While rowing alone I used all of my 250 pounds to try and push the gunwale down at the middle of the boat. I didn't even get my knuckles wet. On another occasion I took my wife, daughter and her two kids rowing with me. At one point during the voyage four of the five of us were standing and moving about the boat; it didn't feel at all tippy. The grandkids had a ball running around on the boat.

When you look at the boat from the end it is narrow on the waterline, which makes it such a good pulling boat. She quickly gets beamier, however, as the boat heels or as the load increases, making her more stable. This bodes well for her being able to stand up under the press of sail.

I rowed across the lake near my home last Saturday when the wind was blowing about 15 knots creating some nasty wind chop. She didn't ship a drop of water and behaved herself like a lady, tracking straight and true. I decided to stop rowing and see what she would do. She slowly came to a stop and then clocked head to wind. I think that is the payoff for having a long, fairly deep (for a rowboat) keel.

While at the Toledo Wooden Boat Show, a fellow Coot loaned me two binders loaded with information on Scandinavian boats. It included a monograph on the Hardanger Faering by Owen H. Wicksteed prepared for the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, copyright 1978. The author's family owned Kari, a Hardanger faering built in 1892. (I believe that this is the boat on which Paul Fisher based his Kari 2.) The oars used on the Kari were 10 feet, four inches long.

All the rowing I've done so far has been with a pair of 9-foot oars I borrowed from a friend. They move Ravn along just fine, but I feel the need for a little more leverage. I'm at work on a pair of 10-foot oars modeled after a pair of 8-foot Norwegian-made oars that are about 50 years old. They are beautifully made and have a nice shape. I'm excited to finish them and try them out.

One concern I had about Ravn was that she would be more difficult to launch and tow than my 14-foot Chamberlain dory. I need not have worried; even though Ravn is more than three times as heavy and has a deeper draft, it is not noticeably more difficult to launch, recover or tow than my little dory was.

Launch day!

2010-08-22T03:29:00.000-07:00

363 days after turning the boat over she finally got a taste of her true element. I worked late into the night sanding, varnishing and completing other chores so I could take her to the Toledo Wooden Boat Festival yesterday. My wife and I drove to Toledo and launched her about a mile and a half from the festival.

When I thought of launching Ravn I envisioned a larger affair with friends and food, but the actual launch was better than I imagined; just my wife and I at a quiet boat launch with no one else around. I tied a glass nazir (a Turkish bead that symbolizes the eye of God) around the stem with marline and tucked a spruce bow and a raven feather in the marline. Then I said a little prayer to God, poured my favorite beverage on the bow stem. Gave her a little shove off the trailer and she was afloat for the first time!

There's still a lot of work to do -- I need to make the mast, yard, boom, rudder, tiller and fit the hatches on the water-tight compartments -- but I feel like I've really reached a milestone.

The best part is that she rows like a dream. I'm eager to see what she will be like with two, three and four rowers.

Getting the Right Rake

2010-07-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

Atkin specifies Valgerda's mast should rake five inches in 10 feet, that's one in 24 or about two degrees. You don't have to hang around me long before you discover that I'm not a whiz at math or even simple arithmetic. Finding where Ravn's mast step needed to be had me scratching my head for a while. Finally, I took an eight-foot two-by-two, stuck it through the mast partner and marked it. Then I measured five feet up from that mark and made another mark. I made a block two and a half inches long and found another stick longer than five feet. I taped the whole thing together making sure one end of the shorter stick was at the five-foot mark and the block was level with the mast partner. Then I taped a spirit level to the whole lashup. Ravn's keelson is level so I was able to gage when the second stick was perpendicular. I made a mark. Phew!

A pattern, a chunk of purple heart, some time on the bandsaw and hollow-chisel mortiser, rasp, files and sandpaper and PRESTO! A mast step! I also added an screw eye to anchor a downhaul for the boom at the jaws. A little epoxy and I checked another item off the list.

Speaking of lists: I don't have an exhaustive list of jobs left to finish. I only make a series of short lists - with never more than six or eight items. I made the mistake once of ticking off the items remaining to be finished while talking to a friend. This was not written down and I skipped a lot of the small stuff. Still, that experience nearly sunk me into a state of depression. So, to keep off the Prozac, I make my lists short. When I get everything checked off the list I'm working on, I throw it away and start a new one.

Kjeip or Kabes

2010-07-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

I love rowing, but I am not a fan of oar locks. I've tried about every kind, and they just don't feel right. There's something about how the metal engages the wood that takes away from the organic feel of bone and muscle moving wood through water.

My eyes were opened several years ago when I rowed the Hewitt R. Jackson, a replica longboat built by the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport in Aberdeen, Wash. The longboat has 10 rowing stations, is 26 feet long and displaces more than a ton. It's a replica of the longboat Capt. Robert Gray carried aboard the Columbia and would be almost identical to the one in which Capt. Bligh made his famous open-boat voyage.

When I was with the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport - first as an employee, then as a volunteer and a board member - I had many occasions to sail aboard the seaport's flagship, the brig Lady Washington. As wonderful as crewing aboard a square rigger is, the longboat was much more fun. Although there are 10 rowing stations, she will move along smartly with only four or six rowers.

Part of what makes the longboat experience such fun is that the oarsmen pull against a thole pin with the oar held in place with a rope gasket. This was the eye-opening experience I had. This arrangement cured all of the complaints I had against metal oar locks. In addition to the feel - that can't be matched by metal oar locks - thole pins and rope gaskets are traditional, cheap, easily replaced and just look bitching!

Thole pins are what Atkin specified in the plans for Valgerda. I was planning, looking forward in fact, to putting thole pins on Ravn... that is until I saw pictures of faerings fitted out with kabes or kjeip. (I believe that kabe is the name Shetland Islanders call them and kjeip is the Norwegian.) These are even more traditional (on faerings, at least) than thole pins. And they are way more bitching! The problem for me was that I didn't have anything but pictures to go on in designing the two pair of kabes for Ravn.

I scoured the internet for anything I could find out about them. Other than a few pictures and some vague descriptions, I didn't have much to go on. I did decide that I liked the looks of the kjeip on the Viking-era faerings better than later, more modern - like, only a couple hundred year-old, versions. The Viking-era kjeip were made from a section of log with a branch sticking out from it. This would be much stronger than one carved out of a chunk of wood because the grain of the wood would flow correctly - otherwise you have, what woodworkers call, "a short-grain situation."

As soon as I decided to put kjeip on Ravn I should have shouldered my ax and bow saw and headed into the woods, but I didn't think I would have time to find what I needed and have them dry in time for the launch. Boy, was I blind: that was about 18 months ago!

Last winter I decided to dive in and make some out of white oak and glue some reinforcement pieces on the sides to strengthen the short grain so it didn't break off. This all looked good on paper, but once I sawed, glued and started to shape them I soon lost my enthusiasm. They just did not look right.

My enthusiasm returned a couple months ago when I spotted some eight-quarter purple heart in a specialty hardwood store in Seattle. I'd also been revising the design in my head and had a solution to the short-grain problem. Finally, last week I put pencil to paper, came up with a shape I liked and suddenly I was a kjeip maker again. My solution to strengthening the short grain is to drill a half-inch hole through the middle of the upright portion of the kjeip and epoxy in a half-inch dowel of purple heart I turned on the lathe. It sounds easier than it was, but it wasn't too bad.

The thing that took the longest was the shaping, first with a bandsaw, then with rasps, files and sandpaper. The process reminded me a lot of making cabriole legs, like Queen Ann and Chippendale tables have. The difference was that nearly any furniture wood is more yielding than purple heart. The stuff is like a mineral!

I used my best epoxy-gluing techniques to attach them to the gunwale and then reinforced the join with some 5/16 dowels. With no metal fasteners, you can remove the whole affair with a handsaw should it ever need to be replaced.

A hole - drilled on a near diagonal from outboard, aft to inboard - is for the length of quarter-inch line that will capture the oar. I may eventually splice together a proper gasket, but for now I want to play around with the length of the loop so I will use a Zeppelin bend to join the two ends.

Keel Questions

2010-05-01T06:43:00.001-07:00

The keel on Atkin's Valgerda may be the most controversial element in his design catalog. Yesterday I received an email from Tom in Georgia, who is about to order Valgerda plans, but needs shallower draft than the 18 inches drawn by Atkin. Here's part of my reply:

"I looked at the Atkin keel and decided to go with a little deeper version of what a traditional faering would have. Faerings, according to Atkin's own account, had a 4-inch keel that ran the length of the boat. I deepened that to 6 1/2 inches and included about 100 pounds of ballast. Without any keel at all the boat draws 6 inches, so I figure mine will draw about 12 1/2 inches. It also looks better to my mind than the Atkin keel. No doubt his would go to windward better, but not much better, I'll bet. The decrease in the wetted surface should improve performance under oars and all points of sail other than hard on the wind. That's my justification. For more on my thinking on the keel look at this post http://valgerda.blogspot.com/2009/09/ravns-keel-part-one_19.html and the two that follow it. You can also look at Rick Nardone's excellent build at http://ricksboatshop.blogspot.com/2010/04/closing-in.html and the comments following it.

"I did think about a centerboard, but not for too long. In the second issue of Boat Design Quarterly O'Brian talks about a Valgerda that he rowed and said it was a fine boat "except the builder ruined it by giving it a centerboard." I understand your need for shallow draft, but not having a centerboard opens up the inside of the boat in a wonderful way. I think it weakens the boat to have a centerboard and the board is always a maintenance problem and the case usually ends up leaking. That said, I'd love to see a Valgerda with a centerboard. I bet, with a proper foil, it would go to windward better than the original design. But, I think what we are taking about here is a full redesign.

"If I wanted a boat like Valgerda, but with a centerboard, I think I would build a Ness Yawl. They are beautiful boats and designed with a centerboard and kick-up rudder. Check out the voyage of my friend Giacomo from London to Istanbul in a Ness Yawl http://www.manontheriver.com/."

Rick Nardone and I have discussed this as well. His solution (unless he sells his boat and the new owner wants something different) is to go with a 4-inch deep keel like the original faerings had, but include the lead ballast into the keel. Since Atkin's lines are true to the original faerings it will need some ballast. Workboat designs need additional ballast because they were designed to carry cargo. I much prefer to have my ballast built into the keel than have it loose in the bilge. Having it in the keel means more room in the boat and less danger of loose lead damaging the boat or the crew in a knockdown. Having the lead lower means better righting moment too.

Valgerda's keel was a hot topic on the Wooden Boat Forum. The thread started in January 2001 and went on until late 2005. (http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthread.php?t=11679) I'don't think you could go wrong building the keel according to the design. I also think the Vikings knew a thing or two about boats. Whether my solution is a good one or not remains to be seen.

Paint the damn thing!

2010-04-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

There are some projects on a boat the will go on for ever if you let them. Such is (was?) the figurehead on my boat. I could not leave it alone! I would walk by the bow of the boat on my way to do something else and grab a carving gouge or my patternmaker's rasp or a scrap of sandpaper and an hour... or two... or three later I would still be at it. I worked like I was in a trance.

There are at least two dangers in this: one is that you don't get anything else done (which happened to me since I was supposed to be building a cradle for my new grandson, Corbin, who came two weeks early) the other is you can get carried away and ruin what you are working on -- a slip of a carving gouge could really have set me back.

I decided today that I would allow my self 30 minutes for some final sanding, then I would paint the damn thing. In the background of this shot you can see the spray paint can containing the primer. Right after I took this picture I finished masking it and primed it. Now I can finally move on to other projects on the boat and finish the cradle.

I missed the first wooden boat show of the season in Depoe Bay so I could go to Washington and see my new grandson. This lets me procrastinate finishing the boat a little longer. I am feeling the pressure to get it done because we are beginning to have some very nice days. Days that would be great for sailing and rowing.

Finishing

2010-04-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

Got some finish on the thwarts and combings. I'm trying to make all the mystery mahogany look somewhat coherent.

I had some problem with a batch of epoxy: it did not kick. After three days it was still sticky. Luckily, it wasn't an important joint, just some filler around the base of the figure head. I scraped it all off and mixed another batch, which kicked off like a champ.

Heads and tails

2010-03-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I spliced on Ravn's figurehead. I've been putting it off for a couple of reasons. One reason was that I wanted to get the curve of the dragon's neck to flow into the stem. Another concern was just getting a nice-fitting splice so it would be solid. But most of all I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of putting it on at all. A couple of weeks ago I shaped the stern stem and I think it turned out real nice. I simply couldn't go wrong replicating the same shape at the bow.

I guess if you peeled away all the layers of the onion, my real concern was: Would it look goofy? I have no doubt that many will think it does, but I decided I like it. Those who don't, can just go hang.

As I was fairing the neck into the stem I realized that I carved this thing 10 years ago. At the time I had not decided for sure on a design. It's been a long journey.

Furniture

2010-03-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

A furniture commission has kept me busy in the shop and slowed progress on the boat. I did manage make time to install the rest of the boat furniture, however. I epoxied in the risers for the rowing thwarts and made the thwarts and the mast bench by March 6 when my oldest son, Ethan, and granddaughter, Maddy, visited. I talked them into the photo above.

Atkin said the original faering from which he drew the plans had removable rowing thwarts. "Our forefathers knew a thing or two about making boats handy," he said, so he retained that feature in his design. I determined early on that I would keep that feature as well on Ravn.

What I discovered is that the thwarts are close enough in size that it's easy to mix them up and get them turned around. My solution to that problem was to use a scratch beader to scratch a single bead in the center thwart and a double bead in the forward thwart. I put them on the forward edge. They looked so good that I decided to scratch beads in the mast bench and the "princess seat" as well. It's a nice touch that serves a practical purpose, but it was another unplanned project that took time away from finishing the boat.

Man on the River

2010-02-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

Even though we've never met, I feel a special kinship to Giacomo De Stefano. The two of us have developed an on-line friendship spurred by our mutual love of faerings and faering-inspired boats.

Giacomo lives on a boat in Venice. A few years ago he rowed and sailed up the Po River, Italy's largest river, in a Ness Yawl, a boat similar to the one I'm building. He did it "by using only the resources donated to us during the voyage. Its purpose was to make people aware of this river that is dying, and of how to live in a way that is both light and slow."

Now he is engaged in an even more grand project. This time he will go from London to Istanbul by oar and sail with the goal of zero environmental impact. This new journey will be more than 3,200 miles starting in London, going down the River Thames, along the southeastern coast of England, across the English Channel to Calais, through French canals to the Rhine and then the Danube to the Black Sea and then to Istanbul. Giacomo plans to leave London in April 2010 visiting England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine and Turkey in about six months.

"There will only be the wind and a sail," he says on his Web site. "All of this not for a sporting achievement but to build a new relationship with nature, water and rivers." And, no doubt, the people he will meet him and help him along the way.

Giacomo views himself as more than just an environmentalist. He defines himself as a “new world traveler.” Like an environmental missionary setting out without purse or script, he will use the “gift economy” and rely on the food and other items given to him to complete his journey. He plans to live aboard his open boat, sleeping under a cotton canvas tent and cooking on board with a small stove made from a used beer keg. He will have a small solar panel on board to charge his telephone and radio. His budget for the trip is 0 Euros.

His 19-foot Ness Yawl is under construction now in Italy in a company's waiting room. Upon its completion, he has an arrangement with a shipping company to have the boat sent to London when the courier has room on a regular run to keep his carbon debt as small as he can.

“I wanted to show that it's possible to travel and have a good time, while respecting nature and helping the local economies," Giacomo said in a Watercraft magazine article. "In 1999, I began to study the way mass tourism is destroying many parts of the planet. There must be a way, I told myself, to travel like Bruce Chatwin, Henry David Thoreau and other interesting people did in the past; a way to move without polluting too much. It's possible to have wonderful holidays, travelling slowly by bicycle, on foot and by boat, meeting people, tasting the local food and following the local customs.”

Giacomo is a great inspiration to me. I think of journeys I can take in Ravn that will build a new relationship with nature and the ocean and inspire me and others. More immediately, Giacomo's pending adventure and his encouragement of my building project has helped me recently as my family experienced some heart ache and as I faced some difficult tasks building Ravn.

Giacomo figures it will take him about a million oar strokes to complete his journey. I wish I could join him for all, or at least part, of that. My thoughts will go out to him each mile of his quest.

The Princess Seat

2010-01-27T21:49:00.000-08:00

I can think of few things more enjoyable than spending time on the water while rowing face to face with your sweetheart. Rowing face to face with a good friend is a close second. The joy of being in nature, the seclusion of being on a boat together and the inescapable seating arrangement is bound to provoke intimate conversation and closeness. With that in mind, I paid special attention to the design and execution of Ravn's stern seat. I wanted it to be comfortable and inviting with a nice backrest and plenty of style.

In my previous boat, a Chamberlain dory, I added a carved backrest to the stern seat. It was one of the best projects I ever did on that boat. It improved the comfort a great deal and provided some handy storage behind it. A pair of carved dragon heads gave it a throne-like quality and my wife soon dubbed it "the princess seat." (See A Small Swampscott, Sept. 5, 2009 post for a photo.)

I'm happy with how Ravn's princess seat turned out. Today I spent several hours inside the boat sanding and scraping. I took a couple of breaks lounging on the princess seat. It proved to be very comfortable and secure. As I ran my hand over the curved surfaces of the backrest and reclined against the starboard rail, my mind drifted to a time in the not-too-distant future when Ravn will come alive in the water carrying a cargo of conversation.

Huginn and Muninn

2010-01-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

Each day Odin sends Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) to fly over Midgard (Middle Earth). The two ravens return and sit on Odin's shoulders whispering in his ears what they have seen.

It's from this Nordic myth I derived my boat's name. In nod to my Danish grandmother, I decided to use the Danish spelling. It also meant I had fewer letters to carve.

Ravens are one of my favorite animals. They are so smart and fun to watch, especially when they are teaching their young in the springtime. It's easy to see why they play an important part in many different cultures. Ravens feature prominently in the culture of Northwest Indigenous people and is even credited with dropping a stone in the ocean that grew into the earth upon which humans live. Raven is known as "the trickster" and is often the main character on Haida totem poles.

It's also just a great name for a black boat!

Stern Combing

2010-01-06T21:19:00.000-08:00

The warm rain has returned to the Oregon coast and temperatures in the boat shop are in the 50s, warm enough to epoxy Ravn's stern combing in place.

I had fun carving the name in it and the two ravens. The cold temperatures drove me inside the house to do the carving, which allowed me to enjoy my grandchildren when they visited for a few days. Elijah spent a lot of time playing a video game where he caught fish. "I caught another fish, papa," he would holler from the couch. "What kind?" says I. "Rock fish," he would report. We were both having fun together doing different things.

Years ago I bought a large C clamp for $8 that some welder had given a deeper reach. I've only used it three or four times since then, but when you need it, nothing else will do. The 13 inches of reach was more than enough to clamp the center of the combing to the stern bulkhead. My two largest F clamps had just enough reach to help cement the marriage.

Earlier, while I had some epoxy mixed, I added a little graphite and put a drop in each of the bird's eyes. The next day I pared the epoxy flush with the bird's face for a perfect inlay.

Ravn's Carvings

2009-12-14T15:37:00.000-08:00

With the temperature hovering around the freezing mark in the shop, I moved my carving bench inside and worked on some of the carvings that will become a part of Ravn. On the bow will be a dragon head and on the inside of the stern combing Ravn's name and carvings of two ravens on either side of the name.

The combing was difficult to fit, not made any easier by the near-freezing temperatures. I made a pattern out of scrap left over from Ravn's planking to get close to the right shape and size of the stern combing. The compound angles and the slight curve in the stern bulkhead kept me going back and forth, from bench to boat, using rasps, files and planes until I got a good fit.

Standing in the warm kitchen carving was pure delight. Daytime temperatures are now in the mid 40s. I hope that was our only cold spell for this winter. Living on the Oregon coast narrows the temperature range where you are comfortable. It is rare that it is too cold or too hot. Most of the time it's just right.

The Sampson post post

2009-11-29T21:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I made and installed Ravn's Sampson post. With the decks finished It's time to put on the mahogany combings, but I had to get the Sampson post in place before I could do that.

I had a chunk of eight-quarter teak I've been hording for years. I jointed one edge and ripped a square length off to make the post. I held it in place and decided how much should stand above the deck and made a mark. Shaping the champers and the characteristic depression for the bit was a lot of fun. Teak is wonderful wood to work with: it carves beautifully and using a sharp plane on it is pure joy. Your edges don't stay sharp for long working with teak because of the silica in the wood, but it's worth the extra trips to the oil stones.

For the cross piece I turned a five-eighths spindle out of a scrap of purple heart. While it was still in the lathe I used the point of my turning tool to etch some rings in the section that will be buried in the post so when I glued the cross piece in place the epoxy will have some purchase.

Before I put the fore deck on I clamped the blank I would make the Sampson post out of in place and drilled holes for the three quarter-inch lag screws that go from inside the bulkhead into the post. Another longer lag screw goes through the Sampson post and the bulkhead into the bulkhead knee that's glued and screwed to the keel.

I mixed up a small batch of epoxy with colloidal silica one-to-one by volume and prepared all of the teak surfaces that would get glued by cleaning them with acetone to get rid of the natural oils that make teak such a great outdoor wood. I had to use a wooden mallet to tap the purple heart cross piece in place. It wasn't overly tight, but I wasn't taking any chances splitting the post I'd put so much work into so I held it in a clamp, just in case. All the screws snugged down tight. The Sampson post is there to stay.

The Sampson post is not in Valgerda's plans. Like the water-tight compartments in the bow and stern, it is a feature I borrowed from the Kari II plans. I think it will be a handy addition to the boat.

While I had some epoxy on hand I installed the screw eye that will secure Ravn's forestay. You can just see it in the background of the photo. It's exciting to start putting some of the finishing touches on the boat.

Decks aye!

2009-11-29T19:45:00.000-08:00

The lookout calls from the main top, "On deck!"

The helmsman answers, "Deck aye!"

So starts every communication aboard tall ships from topmen to crew on deck.

Now Ravn has decks, two of them. Decks? Aye!

After installing the deck beams I used some scrap plywood (thin shards not much good for anything else), yellow glue and spring clamps to make a rough pattern for each deck. I then laid the pattern on my remaining sheet of quarter-in plywood to find the best arrangement, marked the points, and used a batten to connect the dots. I rough cut a little wide and refined the fit with a block plane and file. One of the things that made fitting the decks tricky was that there are cutouts for two frame heads and a notch in the pointy ends for the stems.

Once I was happy with the fit, I mixed up a batch of epoxy and used a foam roller to wet the top of the deck beams and seal the bottom of the deck. I then used wood flour to thicken the epoxy to a peanut butter consistency and spread it a little less than a quarter inch thick on the tops of the deck beams and the tops of the bulkheads. I carefully dropped the deck in place and piled scuba weights and other heavy things I could find on the deck about where the deck beams and the tops of the bulkhead are. I then used the thickened epoxy to fillet between the deck and the hull.

The next day I checked my work by using a flashlight and a mirror to look at the inside of the decks. There was uniform squeeze out around the deck beams. It looks like I got a good, strong connection.

After sanding and fairing the deck, especially the fillet between the deck and hull, I lay my remaining six-ounce fiberglass cloth on the decks. Months ago I ordered 15 yards of 60-inch wide cloth. I covered the outside of the boat before putting the keel on and put a second layer over the keel and everything below the waterline. I carefully saved the scraps and cut them into 4-inch wide strips to tape the plank seams inside the hull after she was turned over. I didn't know how much cloth I had left on the roll, but I hoped I could glass both decks without coming up short and without too much left over. It turns out there was only about three inches left over when I laid it out. Phew! That was a close one! I could not have guessed any better how much cloth I would need.

I wet out the fiberglass cloth with epoxy and using a foam roller and a two-inch disposable bristle brush. It went well and the decks look good. So good, in fact, that I plan on leaving them bright -- at least for the time being.

One feature about the decks I'm pleased about is that they are mostly level with a slight crown and a slight slope from the ends to midships. I wanted water to drain outboard at the corners. Because they are fairly level and most of their perimeter is enclosed I think they will be more handy than highly crowned decks above the sheer. I envision putting stuff on them for a short while in a calm anchorage and not having to worry about it falling into the drink. Speaking of the sheer, I also wanted to preserve that most distinctive and beautiful visual feature of faerings by keeping the deck below it.

Without a doubt, though, my most persistent vision of the decks in use is that of my six-year-old grandson and his three-year-old sister (PFD'd and harnessed, of course) taking command of the decks. Her holding on to the stern stem watching Ravn's wake and big brother at the figurehead on lookout.

Hunting and Gathering

2009-11-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

In addition to actually building a boat there is just a lot of hunting and gathering you need to do. Finding the right rudder hardware is one example (Gudgeons and Gudgeons, Oct. 25 post).

In September I sold my beloved Chamberlain dory to a couple from California who drove to Lincoln City to get it. My goal was to sell the boat for enough money to get an new trailer and the sail for Ravn. I bought a new E-Z Loader trailer two weeks after I sold my dory. It's hard finding a trailer that is designed for a sailboat. This trailer is generic enough I can make it work. It has some very nice improvements over the trailer on my Chamberlain dory. For instance, it has a new type of bearing that doesn't need greasing ever! The trailer is all galvanized and it's designed so it doesn't have leaf springs to rust out.

I had $200 left over after the trailer purchase, which is about half what a new lug sail for a Valgerda would cost. Luckily my friend John Kohnen was willing to part with the sail from his Valgerda for my two remaining Benjamin Franklins. John's boat was built in the late '50s for the Weyerhaeuser family. It is a beautiful boat, but it has been extensively modified from the original with, among other things, an inboard engine. He said if it was ever to sail again it would need a larger sail. An assessment with which I agree and for which I'm grateful. I picked up the sail from John's place in Eugene earlier this month. It really is a beautifully-made sail. It seems almost new, so I'm sure it's not original to the boat. I can hardly wait to put it to use.

Yesterday I got another detail almost taken care of: two marine patrol deputies from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department came to my house to give me a Boat Hull Identification Number (HIN) Inspection. It was nice of them to come by and do it. I was going to get a photo of them to put in the blog, but I forgot. Now I can send that report in, along with the letter from the State Marine Board, to the State of Oregon and get my HIN and registration numbers. Then I'll be legal to be on Oregon waters.

About the only things left to gather is a 5/16" dia. bronze rod for the rudder gear and the wood -- spruce if I can get it, cvg fir is a good second choice -- for the mast, spars and oars.

Bow Deck Beams

2009-11-15T22:31:00.001-08:00

Before installing the other deck beams in the bow, I had to install the bow eye and the interior flange for the water-tight hatches. I was glad I waited until I bought a new trailer for Ravn before installing the bow eye; I would have put it too high. I had to measure from the trailer's main beam to the winch and translate that to where the bow will be when it's on the trailer to find the right place to drill the hole. I coated the galvanized eye bolt and the inside of the hole with epoxy before bolting it on.

As I was installing the piece of plywood that will serve as the interior flange for the water-tight hatches I had an epiphany: in stead of mitering the secondary deck beams into the main deck beam, why not cut slots in the plywood frame and bulkhead and run them fore and aft? It was much easier and it ended up in stronger joints and more support for the deck.

After milling the old-growth fir to the dimensions I wanted, I just laid them across the bulkheads, marked where they were to go and cut notches in the bulkheads with a back saw and a frame saw. I dry-fit the deck beams and used a compass to mark out the long scarf where the deck beams join the inside of the hull at the bow. I took the deck beams to the bandsaw and cut the scarf while sighting down the two lines. It only took a few minutes to do the whole operation and I glued them in with thickened epoxy. The next day I cut off the ends that were sticking through the number 2 bulkhead.

Finally a project on the boat that took less time than I figured it would!

Stern Deck Beams

2009-11-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

I've spent a couple of weeks filling, taping and sanding the inside plank seams. I also used fiberglass tape to tab in all of the plywood bulkheads. Now it's time to work on the decks at the stern and bow. They are about the same, being a double ender, but after doing the stern deck beams I decided to do the bow differently. More about that later.

I installed the main deck beam when I assembled the stem and number 10 and 12 frames together back when I was building the skeleton (see Building Ravn's Backbone in September's posts). The deck beam connected the top part of the two frames and the stem and made them stable enough that they stayed in alignment while I put them on the building form.

I should mention that the watertight compartments in the bow and stern are not part of the original Valgerda plans, although at least one builder in Australia added them to the boat he built from Atkin's original plan. They are, however, a feature in the Selway-Fisher Kari 2 plans.

I wanted the bow and stern compartments for two reasons: the reserve flotation should Ravn ever become swamped and dry storage for gear. I also think it will help keep the boat neat and shipshape, which enhances safety at sea.

The deck beams are made out of some old-growth douglas fir that I've had for years. A friend gave it to me when I was patching the fir floors in my 100-year-old home. It is tight, light and stiff -- just what you want for a deck beam. When you cut the wood it has a dusty, pitchy smell that is very different from the smell you get cutting into, say, a douglas fir 2-by-4 from the lumber yard.

I'm going to use 6mm plywood covered with 6-ounce fiberglass cloth for the deck. I would be a little more comfortable using 9mm plywood, but that would mean another trip to Portland and another $90. I have a full sheet of 6mm left over from planking so I'll use that. The thinner plywood means I need to put in additional deck beams so the deck won't flex too much.

I suppose I could write several posts on things I would do differently if I built the boat over. Not that I'm unhappy with how the boat is going together or the work I've done, but I feel a couple things could be improved upon. One thing I would do is put a deck hatch in the middle of the stern deck between frame's 10 and 12. That would be the best access to the space and it would be fairly easy to secure and keep watertight. It would also be fun to build and look cool. For now I'm going with a tight flat deck with limited access through the stern seat bulkhead hatch.

The miter joints into the main deck beam were easy to cut with my old Jackson backsaw and a chisel. Where the deck beams meet the side of the boat I simply scribed them with a compass and took them to the bandsaw. The miter joint into the main deck beam retained much of the meat of the main deck beam and did not weaken it substantially. When I was gluing the whole thing together I decided at the last minute to epoxy a rectangular piece of plywood scrap under both joints just in case. I'm kind of a belt and suspenders guy sometimes. It ruins the elegance of the joints, but no one will ever see them anyway.

Gudgeons and gudgeons

2009-10-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

I was pleased and relieved to finally find some rudder hardware that is designed for a double ender. A big bonus for me is that it's made out of bronze and not stainless steel. The rudder gudgeons and the sternpost gudgeons also seem to be very strong and heavy castings without looking clunky at all.

You boating types are most likely scratching your heads right now wondering why I have gudgeons and no pintles. You can't have one without the other, right? Well, that's what I thought too. Then I found Duck Trap Woodworking, an outfit in Maine that builds traditional wooden boats, including a very pretty double ender called Matinicus Double Ender. They are primarily boatbuilders, but of late they devote most of their time helping others learn how to build their own boats. They designed this rudder hardware for the types of boats they build. Here's how it works from their Web site (www.duck-trap.com):

"A piece of 5/16-inch bronze rod passes through all four fittings and acts as a hinge pin. Why no pintles? Because they have a uncanny tendency to become unshipped. Attached using the rod, should the rudder strike bottom, it can jump and then drop right back down in place. We've been using this system for years, and never had a problem."

This sounds good to me! I haven't liked any of the gudgeon and pintle combinations I've found - and I've been looking for months. I was beginning to think I would have to have something custom made. I'm really glad I don't have to do that.

I decided not to get the polished hardware to save a few bucks. But I'm also considering not polishing the hardware I got and leaving it more of a workboat finish. I think it might be more in keeping with the look I'm trying to achieve.

It's Alive!

2009-10-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

I've often felt that building a boat is about as close as a craftsman can come to creating a living thing. Building an instrument, a violin say, is another instance where an inanimate object seems to take voice and become a living creature. But boats have movement, their own distinctive motion and reaction to the wind and water. The chuckle of the ocean passing by the hull of a wooden boat is amplified like a fine instrument amplifies the vibrations of bowed strings.

Last week, as I ran my hand along the inside of the hull after sanding it, I felt Ravn's heart beat. It was really the planks under tension amplifying the base beat of the music I was listening to, but it felt like a living thing under my hand. I've thought about it for days and can't get it out of my head.

I was telling this to my neighbor, Tom Dollar, who builds guitars, and he gave me a knowing look. As he ran his hand along the planks of the boat he said, "What you've got here is wood under tention, just like a big guitar."

Bow Chocks

2009-10-19T21:36:00.001-07:00

I spent the better part of a day making a couple of bow chocks out of purple heart. Most of the shaping was done with my patternmaker's rasp, a great tool. I think they look just right for the boat. Metal bow chocks, even nice bronze ones, just wouldn't do, but I did want the functionality of having a couple of chocks to keep anchor and dock lines from sawing off the finish from the gunwales and destroying themselves. So I spent the time and made what seemed to me to be right for the boat.

This is one of the wonderful things about building your own boat. It is also the reason building a boat the way you want it takes so damn long.

Gunwales and inwales

2009-10-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

I've come to accept that almost every step in the boatbuilding process takes twice as long as you estimate it will. Putting the gunwales and inwales on Ravn was the exception -- it took about 10 times as long.

Part of it was that I chose to use purple heart for the job. I had some nice 12-foot long strips left over from laminating the keel. I've also come to like the wood for how strong and hard it is. It also glues well. The downsides to the wood are that it does not work well with planes, chisels and spokeshaves because it tears out easily, it gives you the nastiest splinters of any wood I've ever worked with and it smells like -- I'm not sure what -- wet dog, maybe? It's pretty much on the other end of the spectrum from the wonderful pine scent many people associate with woodworking. Another feature of purple heart is that it doesn't take a set. This makes it a favorite of recurve and longbow makers who like to use purple heart to laminate the limbs of their bows, lots of spring and not a lot of memory in the wood. I think that will be a good thing in the long run, but it caused some drama during the installation of the gunwales.

I found out just how springy purple heart is after gluing the two sections of the port side gunnel to Ravn. I let the epoxy cure for a couple of days before I took the clamps (all 64 of them). Just as I stepped back to admire my work, "POP!" "Crack!" "BAM!" Starting from the stern, the gunwale broke loose and lunged at me. It hit the tablesaw instead and I was spared. The noise was loud enough that my wife opened the garage door to see what happened and if I was OK. I stood there in stunned silence and shook my head. I went in the house and didn't return to the shop for a couple of days.

I made a couple rookie mistakes gluing the gunwale. First, and most important, I didn't rough up the surface of the hull or the wood. The hull had two coats of epoxy on it and was real smooth. The second mistake I made was to glue using epoxy only with no additive in it. These were both things that I knew, I just didn't think about them. I was too busy cutting the complex bevels at the bow and stern ends of the gunwale and then measuring and marking the scarf in the middle. It's very exacting work that requires you to clamp, measure, cut, reclamp, mark, unclamp, refine the cut, then finally glue up. I was so focused on getting all the cuts right I totally forgot what I knew about making a good epoxy glue up.

When I returned to the shop I roughed up all the mating surfaces with 60-grit sand paper, mixed in the best adhesive filler I know of (colloidal silica one-to-one by volume) and clamped it up. I also decided to add six quarter-inch galvanized carriage bolts to each side of the boat. I had galvanized carriage bolts on the gunwale of my Chamberlain dory and they did a fine job for all the years I had the boat and will serve for many more decades I'm sure. The thing I want to avoid on this boat is any stainless steel. I'm not a fan. Give me galvanized iron or silicon bronze every time! Until the inwales were in place so I could through-bolt them to the gunwales, I always kept a few strategically-placed clamps on the gunwale just in case.

The inwales were laminated in three-eighth-inch strips: two laminates in the spaces between the frames and two inside the frame heads. I notched the top of the oak frame heads for the two inner laminates. It made for a strong, stiff structure on the sheer. Since I will mount the kabes for the oars, the shrouds and mast bench for the mast, and rope traveler for the main sheet on the inwales, they will need to be strong .

Can't have too many clamps

2009-09-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

It's true: you can't have too many clamps. I used 64 to glue the gunwale. The gunwale is made of purple heart and it has a lot of spring back. In fact, a friend of mine who builds recurves likes to use purple heart in the laminations because it doesn't "take a set." A couple of things have slowed me down on the boat, but I'm hoping to pick up the pace again.

Right side up

2009-09-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

I live in a close-knit neighborhood. It's like something out of Leave It to Beaver. Six of my neighbors came to the turning. On the day of the turning my daughter, Natalie, her two children, my daughter's friend and her two children were also visiting and they helped as well. In spite of the short notice, three members of the Western Oregon Messabouts (Coots) -- Jim Ballou from Portland, Jack Brown from Depoe Bay and John Kohnen, from Eugene and author of The Mother of All Maritime Links and builder of the Atkin Co. Web site -- came to the boat turning. I'm really glad they did. They were all a big help and a lot of fun. John has helped with many boat turnings and he quickly suggested the best way to do it.

Earlier in the day I rigged up a block hung from one of the rafters in my garage. It was above the middle of the boat and I had a sling around the boat so I could take the weight of the boat on the sling and spin it in place. I thought it might work but John knew better. He said we should take it out, turn it over and take it back in. That was the proven method.

I was glad John came for a couple of other reasons too: he took some wonderful photos and he brought a sail from his Valgerda for me to look at. John posted his photos to the Atkin Co. Web site and you can see them here: http://www.boat-links.com/Atkinco/Photos/Valgerda/. John purchased his Valgerda a few years ago. It had an inboard engine installed in it. He said if she was to ever sail again she would need a larger sail so the old one, which was well made and in good shape, was for sale. I told him I wanted it and we later agreed on a price.

The actual turning didn't take long. We hauled the boat out onto the mattresses in the driveway and turned it over. I unscrewed the rest of the building form, pulled it out of the way and set up the saw horses. Then we lifted the boat back into the garage. The sling did come in handy by keeping the boat upright on the saw horses until a few days later when I had time to screw supports onto the saw horses and level up the boat.

Four adults could have done the whole turning easily, but it was nice to have all the help. It also made for a party atmosphere, which I appreciated as well. By happy chance, my neighbors, the Dollars, had a couple of old mattresses in their garage. They graciously loaned them for the turning to keep Ravn's black finish from getting scratched. Natalie recorded the event on video and with a still camera. Her friend went for pizza. The four kids ran around and generally got in the way. It was a great day!

Ravn gets her black feathers

2009-09-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

More sanding. I really learned to appreciate my tool-triggered Fein vacuum and random-orbit sander. When everything was smooth and ready for some final coats, I mixed up some large batches of epoxy, added about 10 percent powdered graphite as a filler and rolled it on. I've heard many claims from boat builders about how adding graphite to final coats of epoxy makes the boat more slippery, helps it slide over rocks and even that it makes the hull so slippery that barnacles and other marine growth can't get a foothold. I'd like to believe it, but it sounds too good to be true and probably is. What I do know is that it makes the hull very black and shinny. That's what I wanted. Ravn needed her black feathers.

She was now ready to turn over. On a Friday I put out the call to my neighbors and to the Western Oregon Messabouts (Coots). Monday was the day.

Ravn's keel, part two

2009-09-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

I laminated two-inch wide strips of purple heart on my workbench. I wanted everything to be straight. The main assembly was a little more than 6 1/2-inches tall. At the forward end it had a space for the lead ballast keel. To make sure the keel went straight on the centerline of the boat I drilled two holes large enough for 5/16ths galvanized lag screws through the centerline of the keelson. Then I put the laminated keel up against carefully marked where the holes should go and used a self-centering doweling jig to drill the holes in the keel. I buttered up the bottom of the keelson and the top of the keel with thickened epoxy and my neighbor, Ray, and I lifted it into place. Ray held it steady while I drove the bolts in from inside the boat. It snugged down real nice.

I then clamped a plywood ramp into place and we slid and lifted the lead ballast keel into place. More thickened epoxy on all the mating surfaces and I drove four 3/8ths inch galvanized lag screws through the lead keel and into the purple heart wood keel. I packed the countersink holes in the lead keel with lead filings and filled them with epoxy. It was a good way to get rid of the lead filings and would add a little weight to the bottom-most part of the keel. I then fitted and epoxied smaller pieces of purple heart forward of the lead keel and drove a 5/16ths galvanized lag screw through them into the main wood keel. The result was that the lead was not only held in place with the four lag screws and epoxy, but it is dovetailed into the wood keel as well.

I did some shaping of the wood in the front to give it a nice, easy run aft. In the stern section I used some old-growth red cedar as blocking to fill in the skeg area. The red cedar is rot proof like the purple heart, but much lighter to keep weight out of the ends. It is soft, but I surrounded it with purple heart to protect it.

To form the stems I resawed two-inch wide pieces of purple heart 1/4th-inch thick for the laminations of the outside stems. I cut them to length, painted epoxy on each lamination and clamped and screwed them into place.

Finally, I cleaned up the glue squeeze out, sanded everything and used my router to put champers on each side of the bow stem and switch to a small roundover bit for the bottom edges of the keel. I then laid six-ounce fiberglass cloth over the bottom and wet it out. The cloth covers everything below the waterline making a total of two layers of fiberglass cloth over the strakes and three layers over the garboard-midstrake seam.

The lead pour

2009-09-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've been collecting lead for years. Whenever I saw some at a garage sale I'd buy it. When diving friends got rid of their old lead weights for the fancy bags of shot I gladly took their old lead. I piled it all on our old bathroom scale. It weighed in at more than 100 pounds. Just what I needed for Ravn's ballast keel.

I had a few large pieces that I chopped up using a sledge and a steel wedge used for splitting wood. I got my little charcoal BBQ and decided to sacrifice my smallest cast iron frying pan and I was ready to melt lead.

I spent a couple hours building a wooden form. I had the foresight to put four 3/8-inch wooden dowels and some wooden disks where the holes for the bolts to secure it to the wood keel would go. Drilling wood is a lot easier and less messy than drilling lead. I then buried the form in the back yard so the sides wouldn't break out from the weight of the lead. My neighbor, Ray, and I got out the lawn chairs for an hour, maybe two, of fun. The hour stretched into more than four. Melting lead on a BBQ is possible, but I don't recommend it. My back was sore for three days afterward.

We had to melt the lead in five- to seven-pound batches. A week or so later when Ray and I carried it back into the shop the lead was stratified with voids that I filled with epoxy. I had hoped each pour would melt the last, but it didn't completely. In all, though, it looked pretty good.

Ravn's keel, part one

2009-09-19T19:48:00.001-07:00

Since deciding on Atkins' plan to build Ravn, there's been a lot of hand wringing over the keel. Both Valgerda and Kari 2 plans showed keels significantly deeper than the original Hardanger faerings. The designers added more than a foot to the traditional 4-inch keel of the boats they were designed after.

Atkins wrote: "Because of their lack of initial stability, I designed a new keel - the original boats had a long, shallow keel approximately 4 inches deep. When loaded, they had sufficient lateral plane to hold the little craft on the wind.... I prepared the rather shoal fin keel, fitted with lead ballast of approximately 106 pounds, because of her lack of initial stability and the unlikelihood of her carrying a cargo of fish."

On Kari 2, the designer wrote: "The hull is a close resemblance of the original but we have given her a deeper keel to enhance her windward performance."

I like good windward performance as much as the next guy, but I felt I needed shallow draft more. Neither Valgerda or Kari 2 are deep-draft vessels by any means, but even their modest 18-inch draft seemed too much.

In the end I decided to split the difference. I liked Atkins reasoning about faerings, being work boats, were made to carry loads. So I decided to add a 100-pound chunk of lead to the keel. My keel would be made of purple heart wood, which is denser and heavier than the oak specified by Atkins. It is commonly available and usually cheaper than white oak and glues well with epoxy. It is also rot proof, a very nice thing in a boat. I like to think that Atkins would have specified it had it been as common in the 1950s as it is now. I decided to lengthen the keel and carry it farther astern to increase the lateral resistance and directional stability.

I thought of Billy Atkin's advice: "Now do not be tempted to pull the ends out, raise the sheer heights, swoop up the bow or stern, or do the many things a boat plan always impels one to do. Just put this... boat together and see how well she performs." I bowed my head and started ripping 12-foot purple heart planks into 2-inch wide lengths for the keel.

Fiberglassing the hull

2009-09-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

Since Ravn will be stored outside on a trailer under an acrylic canvas cover, traditional wooden boat construction was not an option for me. Near-shore sailing on the Oregon coast has many hazards as well. I determined I wanted to protect Ravn's hull with fiberglass.

I epoxied four-inch-wide, six-ounce fiberglass tape over the plank joints. Then I sanded the entire outside of the hull. I was lucky to find six-ounce fiberglass cloth that was 60 inches wide. That would take it three inches beyond the joint between the midstrake and the sheerstrake, providing double protection for both chines and a single layer over the entire four lower planks.

I rolled the cloth onto the hull, cut it to length and smoothed it with my hands. The cloth draped the boat nicely with hardly a wrinkle. My original plan was to trim it evenly about three inches beyond the midstreak-sheerstrake seam, but it lay so nice I decided to leave well enough alone. It would add that much weight and having that extra protection all the way to the gunwale could be a very good thing.

I started epoxying the hull about 8 a.m. on a Saturday. It was a dry sunny day and I didn't want it to get too hot before I finished. I mixed, applied, mixed applied as fast as I could and finished about 12:30 p.m. I was exhausted! So was my epoxy--I used every last drop I had to cover the hull. I took my gloves off, closed the garage door, went to bed in the middle of a beautiful summer Oregon coast day and slept for three hours.

Whiskey plank!

2009-09-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

With the frames, stems and keelson all in place and faired, I drove to Portland to get more plywood. It was only $78 a sheet this time. That's because it was only 1/4-inches thick. The stuff is beautiful: five even plys, no voids, waterproof glue all BS1088 -- British Standards for marine plywood. And it works great with a plane or spokeshave. Because all the plys are the same thickness and there are no voids, it bends evenly. Just as in life, a void in a plank sooner or later will collect water and bad things will happen.

I used 1/8-inch ply to make patterns on the garboards. From there, I carefully marked my plank lands and used the batten to mark out the planks. I'd usually mark, cut and fit the starboard side first and then check the fit of the same plank on the port side. In every instance it was almost a perfect fit and I would use it as a pattern to make port plank. That's when the care at setting up the frames and keelson paid off. It also paid off in less wastage. Atkins estimated it would take seven sheets of plywood to plank Valgerda. I did it in six with some nice left over pieces.

The midstrake is asked to do a lot. It starts vertically at the bow, forms a hollow entry, goes to about 18 degrees off horizontal by the mid frame and then back to vertical at the stern stem. While studying the plans I considered going to 3/8ths plywood for the planking because 1/4-inch seems so light, but I'm glad I didn't. I had a rough enough time getting 1/4-inch to go where it needed to go.

Hanging each plank seemed more exciting than the last. When I clamped the whiskey plank into place I felt like throwing a party. The thing about marking milestones with events involving actual humans is you need to finish said milestones on schedule so the humans know when to show up. So far that's only happened once while building Ravn. Everything seems to take at least twice as long as I thought it would. Every once and a while something falls into place like magic, but that's rare and not to be counted on.

I celebrated the whiskey plank with my wife, Virginia, and granddaughter, Maddy, with milkshakes and without any whiskey.

Building Ravn's backbone

2009-09-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

After taking the two stems out of the laminating form and cleaning them up with the jointer and table saw, I clamped them in the full upright position on my workbench to look at them and figure out what to do next. They were beautiful! The sweeping lines really gave me a hint of what the bow and stern of the boat would look like.

Using a large square I started to figure out where important landmarks were on the stems. I marked the waterline and where the top of the sheer would land. I also marked the positions of frames 0 and 2 on the bow stem and 10 and 12 on the stern stem. While still clamped to the workbench, I positioned the two frames on each stem. I glued them in place and, to keep them square to the bench, I glued and screwed a knee brace to each. Finally, on each assemblage, I epoxied the main deck beam to the frames and to the inside of the stem. I made the deck beams from some old-growth fir I've had for years, the grain is amazingly tight. When I unclamped them from the workbench, the stem and frames were solid.

I then built a building form that had to be straight, strong, flat and level. This is one of the frustrating things about building a one-off boat: you do a lot of work (like lofting, pattern making and form building) that that is not part of the boat and you never use again unless you build another boat to the same design. You can't fudge on any of these things, though, or your boat just won't turn out right. I absolutely wanted Ravn to be the best boat I could build. When I finished making the building form, my neighbor, Ray, and I spent the better part of an afternoon making sure it was level and true.

I then clamped the bow and stern assemblages to the building form and took a final measurement for the keelson. I cut a scarf joint into each end of the keelson and epoxied the backbone into one piece.

At the center of the building form I raised the mid-station, which I cut out from the plywood I lofted the boat's frames. I covered the edges of the plywood with cellophane tape so I wouldn't accidentally glue it to the inside of the boat. I also epoxied in the two oak frames and frame number 9, which goes only as high as the thwarts and will become part of the stern seat.

Ravn's skeleton was complete! You really got a sense of what the finished boat would look like: her size and shape. It was at this point that my friends and neighbors thought I was really building a boat. It seemed like I talked of nothing else for the past year or so, but it wasn't until they saw the complete skeleton that they were convinced.

There was a lot of work before she was ready to be planked. I used a 16-foot batten to determine the proper angle of the plank lands and the bevel on the keelson. It took many hours working with a handplane, a small handsaw and a one-and-a-quarter inch chisel, to get things the way I wanted them. Now I was ready to plank.

Making patterns and parts

2009-09-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

Once the lofting was done, I started making patterns for all the frames. For most of the patterns I used eighth-inch plywood. Two of them were a special case and I made them out of quarter-inch ply.

Five of the frames are made out of plywood and two are made of oak. For the plywood frames I used three-eighth-inch marine plywood made in France to BS 1088 standards. It's really good stuff and you pay for it at about $90 for a 4-by-8 sheet. Luckily, I was able to get all five frames out of one sheet.

The oak frames I made from some wonderful white oak I've been air drying for about 10 years. It's hard, tough and heavy but works well with hand tools. The frames are double sawn, which means the frame is put together in sections (futtocks) and doubled so as the grain runs out on one side it is reinforced by the other side and all joints are over staggered on the other half of the frame. It's easy to show someone what a double-sawn frame is, but hard to explain.

Because these were made from oak I used Weldwood Resorcinol plastic resin glue instead of epoxy. For some reason epoxy doesn't work well on Oak, but glues well with Resorcinol. I put wax paper on my woodworking bench and glued the futtocks together on the bench top to keep them flat. I used my biscuit joiner to make sure the butt joints were tight. Using this method I basically made two frames, then glued them together so the joints were staggered. (Maybe you can get the idea better from the pictures.) One difficult thing about using Resorcinol is that it has a narrow working temperature and doesn't cure well in temperatures below 68 degrees F. Since it was getting into fall, I made a tent out of an old plastic shower curtain and put a small, thermostatically-controlled heater in it so the glue would cure.

I have to say that the oak frames were fun to make and impressive when I finished with them. They look real good in the boat too. Any friend who came to visit had to make a trip to the shop to see the frames.

Next, I made the inner stems for the bow and stern. The plan called for them to be pieced together, but I wanted to laminate them because they would be lighter, stronger and have a cleaner appearance. I lofted a pattern for the bow and the stern. (You would think since Valgerda is a double ender they might be the same, but no such luck.) Then I built a bending form. I sawed up more of my white oak into quarter-inch thick strips two-inches wide, painted Resorcinol on both sides and clamped them to the form. I used about 40 of my largest C clamps and all of my F clamps to do the job. Then, since winter had arrived, I hauled it all into the house for 24 hours so it would cure. It was heavy and awkward to get it in the house. Luckily, I didn't get glue anywhere in the house and Resorcinol doesn't smell too bad.

Lofting Ravn

2009-09-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Lofting a boat sounds simple: You plot coordinates from a table of offsets onto a sheet of plywood and connect the dots. Any fifth grader can do it, right? I should have hired a fifth grader. Without going into a lot of detail let me just say that I got through it, but it wasn't easy.

I love maritime traditions. One of them is that the table of offsets are done in feet, inches and eighths -- the first number is feet, the next number is inches and the last number is eighths, sometimes with a plus or minus which means add or subtract a 16th of an inch. I was pleased with myself that when I first looked at Valgerda's table of offsets and understood it. But when I actually started trying to plot points on the sheet of plywood I used as a lofting floor, feet, inches and eighths made my head hurt. I finally went into the computer, made a table and re-entered all of the table of offsets numbers translating them from the traditional into the practical, which, for me, was the number in the box looked exactly like the number on the tape measure. After I did that things went smoothly.

The only lofting error I made was when I actually drew the frames for station zero and station 12, which make up the first and last frames of the boat, they didn't look right to me so I changed them. I discovered the error before I installed the frames and fixed it. More about that later.

Valgerda or Kari?

2009-09-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

The plans arrived from the Atkin Co. in November 2004. I had a lot of work to do to get my shop to where I could accommodate building a 19-foot boat and other projects that needed finishing. While I was working on those other things I studied the plans, built models of Valgerda and fretted about how I was going to build her.
Atkin designed Valgerda in 1952 taking the lines off of a faering imported from Norway. He praised the workmanship and design of the faering that was the inspiration for his design. The only thing he changed was the keel. He said: "I designed a new keel - the original boats had a long, shallow keel approximately 4 inches deep. When loaded, they had sufficient lateral plane to hold the little craft on the wind. With expert handling, they had little difficulty in reaching port." He drew a shallow ballast keel that housed 106 pounds of lead. The other change he suggested in building the faering was that marine plywood be used for the planking since 20-inch wide pine planks are hard to come by.
As my list of projects in the shop diminished, my doubts about whether I'd chosen the right design grew. Then I found another faering, this one was designed Selway-Fisher firm in England. The lines for this design were taken from a historic 1892 boat that now resides in a museum. It was designed for "stitch and glue" construction, which appealed to me also.
In the Selway-Fisher catalog it says of the Kari 2: "The original (was) built in 1892 for the sum of 70 Kroner (£3.10.0). The original is now in a museum and still in excellent condition, having been used by several generations for holidays and a few long expeditions. We have now taken the original lines and produced construction drawings for modern stitch and epoxy construction using plywood. The hull is a close resemblance of the original but we have given her a deeper keel to enhance her windward performance."
I ordered the plans for Kari 2 and they arrived in November 2006 and I built a model from the Selway-Fisher plans. The deeper keels on both Valgerda and Kari bothered me because it was a departure from the original faerings and because I felt I needed a boat with a shallower draft to explore the parts of the Oregon coast I yearned to go.
I decided to build my faering using the Atkin plans for Valgerda. Part of my decision was because I had a hard time wrapping my head around the metric measurements in the Selway-Fisher plans. But more than that Valgerda just appealed more to me ascetically.

Finding Valgerda

2009-09-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

One evening while I was rowing up the Wishkah River, I passed a kayaker paddling downstream. On his fiberglass kayak he had fashioned a pretty good likeness of a horse's head out of Bondo. The figurehead was not very large, but it made a big impression on me. I wanted a figurehead on my boat! Of course it would not be a horse, but a Norse dragon. I had taken up carving to augment my woodworking skills about a year earlier, so found a suitable dragon design, some Alaska yellow cedar and started carving.

It didn't take me long to realize that a dragon head would look a little silly on a Chamberlain dory and since I felt the need for a larger boat I looked to the descendants of Viking vessels for a design.

I am impressed with the designs of Iain Oughtred and for a long time I thought his Ness Yawl was the boat for me. It was about the right length and had a Nordic heritage, by way of the Shetland Islands, but I found myself more and more drawn to it's predecessor, the faering. Oughtred, at the time, also had a faering, Elf, in his design catalog, but at 15 feet it was too small for my purposes, so I kept looking.

I remember the thrill I felt when I discovered Valgerda, a design by John Atkin. Here was the boat I was looking for! In the early 1950s Atkin spotted a faering that had been imported from Norway and took the lines off the boat to use as the basis of his July 1952 design. William and John Atkin used the design as one of their monthly articles in MoToR BoatinG magazine. Her Viking heritage is apparent at first glance -- the graceful sheer and double ends that sweep skyward ending in long stems. She's long and low in the mid sections, just made for rowing.

In June 1992 Mike O'Brien featured Valgerda on the cover of the second issue of Boat Design Quarterly. He said of the design, "Valgerda (is) a nearly perfect Hardangersjekte.... The hull design for the handsome jekte (Norwegian for this type of boat) should be credited to generations of builders along the shores of the Hardangers fjord, Norway. We're told that these double-enders enjoy a reputation for hard work and possess rough-water capability comparable to our peapods and Sea Bright Skiffs."

O'Brien had experence with this design beyond just looking a lines on paper. He rowed a boat built to these plans. Of it he said, "Between strokes, Valgerda's considerable momentum could have carried her into the middle of next week. She loved rough water and had sense enough to mush through the small waves and ride over the big ones. Rowing this boat was pure joy -- or would have been if the builder hadn't installed a centerboard trunk."

This was my boat! A dragon figurehead would look just right on her. I ordered the plans from Mrs. Atkin.

A small Swampscott

2009-09-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

It wasn't too many months later that my mother visited me. I was telling her this story, while we were driving past a boat yard. I'd just gotten to the part where my friend said he would help me build a Swampscott dory when I looked in the boatyard and there one was. I apologized to my mother as I put on the breaks and pulled into the boatyard.

There was the boat my friend and I were going to build – at least a smaller version of it. It was a 13-foot-5-inch Chamberlain dory designed by John Gardner based on dory-builder William Chamberlain's legendary boats. Gardner said of the boat, “For a rowing sea boat, you can't do much better within the 13-foot limit.” I put that to the test many times in the 12 years I owned her and she took care of me every time. For several years I would row eight miles with the boat loaded with camping and archery equipment to bow hunt for elk on an island in Willapa Harbor. I once rowed into some of the steepest wind chop I've ever seen and she didn't ship a teaspoon of water. I also entered a 13-mile rowing race and came in third in the fixed-seat class even though my boat was the shortest in the race.

In the first few years I owned her I did a lot of tinkering: I lowered the rowing thwart and the stern seat, added a carved back rest for the stern seat and reinforced the front thwart to serve double duty as a mast partner. I also added a mast step and made a mast and sprit to convert her into a sailboat. The spritsail rig worked well and I decided that rather than complicate a wonderfully simple boat by adding a centerboard and rudder I would sail her peapod style by trailing the lee oar and shifting my weight to steer. It worked well thanks to a shallow, full-length keel that terminated in a generous skeg. The rig even allowed her to go to windward pretty well.

The boat works well with one or two adults and a couple of kids, was OK with three adults and could even accommodate three adults and two small kids. But when kids and grand kids visit I yearned for a larger boat and one actually designed for rowing and sailing. A longer boat would be faster and increase my range.

Selling Lobo

2009-09-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Fast forward three and a half decades. My three kids are in high school and junior high school and booked solid with activities. Our beautiful 28-foot Pearson Renegade sloop, Lobo, has left the dock only twice in the last year. So I decide to sell her. When I tell the family of my decision, they just shrug. The kids grew up on Lobo and her predecessor Freyja, a 22-foot sloop designed by John Alden. Sailing to them never held the magic it did, and still does, for me. I put a “For Sale” sign on Lobo and before almost anyone in the family noticed, she was gone. I missed her terribly, and still do. She was my dream machine. My escape pod. She was the kind of boat I'd wanted for most of my life, but at this time of my life there just wasn't room for her. To let her waste away at the dock, like so many other boats, was too cruel a fate for such a fine lady. The thing that kept me going was the dream of replacing her with a boat like her – but maybe a few feet longer – when time and family commitments would allow.

One Sunday at church a friend asked me how my sailboat was doing. “I sold it,” I told him. He looked stricken. “You're going to get another one, aren't you?” he asked. I decided not to go into a lot of detail, but I did tell him we didn't use it enough to justify owning a boat that size. “But if I could find a small boat that sailed well and rowed well and that I could keep in my garage, I think I would buy something like that.” I didn't think to much more about it until two weeks later when my friend came up to me after church and said, “I've got the boat for you.” “Oh yeah?” I said. “Yup. A Swampscott dory. And I'll help you build it.”

I knew enough about Swampscott dories to know that he had hit the nail right on the head. That would meet all my criteria and more. I also knew I couldn't wait for years until I could afford the time and money for my dream boat to get back on the water. A boat like a Swampscott dory would be perfect to get me through. But build it?! I was pretty handy with tools, but building a boat? That's a big project. My friend assured me that with his help I could do it. I believed him because he had built a number of wooden drift boats and worked at a commercial boat shop until his body wouldn't let him any more. We decided after steelhead fishing was over for the year we would go to work.

Some weeks later I saw him in the hospital parking lot on a Thursday. “When are we going to start building that boat?” I asked. “Well, I'm going fishing Friday. On Saturday you come to my place and we'll load up my saw and take it to your place and get started.” That was the last time I ever saw him. He died on that Friday of a heart attack doing what he loved, fishing.

How it all started

2009-09-05T00:00:00.001-07:00

I honestly can't remember when I decided to build a faering. A faering is a double-ended boat that is a direct descendant of the type of small boats used by Vikings. The word faering comes from the Norwegian word færing (Old Norse feræringr) that literally means “four-ing,”and refers to the number of oars. The small boats found with the nineth-century Gokstad ship resemble boats still used in Norway and testify to a boat-building tradition more than a thousand years old.

More to the point, they are beautiful. The kind of boat you can't walk away from without turning around for one last look. They are also amazingly seaworthy ranking with some of the best designs in the world for seakeeping ability, speed and versatility. Since the Norwegians have been building and using them for all these centuries they must have a lot going for them. Furthermore, they have had plenty of time to work the bugs out.

I've known about this type of boat for at least 30 years even though they are rare in the Pacific Northwest where I live. About 20 years ago I saw an advertisement in the local sailing magazine by a builder in the Tacoma area who specialized in building faerings. I thought then how beautiful they were and how well they fit in Northwest waters, which are so much like Norway's fjords.

One of the formative movies of my youth was The Vikings with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. Douglas not only stared in the movie, but it was his production company that produced it in 1959. Both he and the director insisted on authenticity in everything right down to the Viking horses they borrowed from a Norwegian zoo. You won't see any horned helmets in this film. One of the amazing things about the picture are the ships: They built three replica Viking longships or dragon ships for the movie that were authentic in every detail. They also built a smaller vessel that Tony Curtis uses to escape from Kirk Douglas. That boat was a little big to be classified as a faering, but it did have four oars. There is, however, a faering in the movie that is almost exactly like the one I'm building. Kirk Douglas uses it to row out to the longship anchored in the fjord where Morgana (the love interest of both Douglas and Curtis) is held prisoner. The boat is 18 feet long, or so, and behaves like the fine lady of the sea she was meant to be in spite of Douglas's character being very drunk and rowing standing up.

My fascination with Vikings started when I was four or five years old. My grandmother, who is of Danish descent, had a beautiful Viking ship made in Copenhagen out of iron. She told me it was a replica of the ship that Lief Erickson sailed to discover Greenland. It was heavy and, fortunately, almost indestructible. The ship was proudly displayed on top of the piano and was one of my grandmother's most treasured objects. I remember on several occasions her letting me sail the ship on the living room carpet for what seemed like hours. I was in heaven. With out a doubt, it was my favorite toy while I lived with her for the first five years of my life. And for years after when we would visit one of the things I looked forward to, almost as much as her cooking, was playing with the Viking ship.