Originally posted on Sunday, June 14 on the FSL Substack. Subscribe and don’t miss out our Weekly Digest updates along with additional photos and video content.
We are now in to Week 53 of our 12m Narai Mk IV Wharram Catamaran build and perhaps one of the toughest weeks for me personally, at least emotions-wise. The repetitive task of prepping and second-coating ALL our stringers really tested me. I have found that with new tasks or, perhaps, less repetitive tasks, I’m able to be full present in the task and all intruding thoughts disappear, as does the concept of time. This week, the seemingly relentless work on the stringers had me stuck in my head where visualizations of sitting on the deck of the finished boat in a remote anchorage sipping a sun-downer only made me deeply frustrated rather than motivated.
Remy revived the mood on his Monday lunchtime visit, showing off his new mullet (cut by our 14yo teenager) — he removed the screws from our gluing work on the backbone stiffeners a day earlier and we walked both backbones outside to turn and flip so the ‘bow’ ends point towards the door, where someday in the next two to three years we will exit the hulls on a tractor and send them down to the water…
We set up the camera and took some still frames from the video shared in our Members’ WhatsApp community group. Seeing the backbones off the floor along with the scale has become a motivational booster — it’s a BIG boat and we’re getting there, step by step.
On Tuesday I really went for it, removing the peel ply, sanding out any imperfections and then wiping clean all of the 29 remaining stringers. The mental battle was REAL and I went home with both a swollen wrist and prefrontal cortex.
Wednesday is usually my day home with Sahara, but I scored a few hours in the afternoon with Ryder offering to babysit so managed to pop in to the yard to get more peel ply prepped to finish the stringers the next day. With some time left after rolling nylon, I jumped at the opportunity to develop my new favorite skill: administering boat injections.
Ironically, I hated science and chemistry in school. Now, I lead our UN Ocean Decade endorsed citizen science initiative ReTISS, and am the ‘alchemist’ of the boat build ;) I have developed a fascination for composites chemistry and learning the complexities of our materials, how they behave alone and how they interact with each other. We use screws to help with positioning and to enable the glue to have an excellent bond with the wood, but need to remove the screws so as to avoid complications down the road. As one of our members explained in our group WhatsApp discussion:
“…when the screw would start to rust (eg due to interaction with acids in wood, esp. in your movingui), the oxide will take up more space than the original material (ie it expands) and can create pretty impressive forces, easily pushing up the glass/epoxy layer and cause delamination.”
We’ll dive in to this topic in an upcoming episode video and Substack.
So I injected the removed screw holes along the ‘topsides’ (what I call the side currently facing up on the floor) of both backbones with mixed epoxy + silica, patched over with peel ply to push down on the filling and minimize sanding. I didn’t get through all of them and I would also later need to come back and top up a few holes once they’d cured where I’d not pushed the needle all the way down to the bottom of the chamber. Lesson learned (among many in this build!). We put a short reel of my process on Instagram, attracting 44,000 views (still rising!) and a bunch of new followers. I initially discovered the peel ply patch idea on YouTube short — I love this use case of social media, where open-source knowledge exchange can help in time saving and sparking ideas.
Thursday it was time to FINALLY check the second coat of epoxy on those remaining stringers off the list. Coating 29 in a day was a huge task and I was damn glad to see the last one going in to the cabin to cure. Remy went in to the yard to work for a couple of hours after his corporate job on Thursday night to begin work cutting the Movingui timber we will be using to make a midships frame.
Friday I finished my epoxy injections on the top side of both backbones, added the cured stringers to the ‘Xmas Tree’ racks where they will now rest for a while until we drum up the motivation to begin gluing the scarf joins to make them the ‘real’ length ready for assembling in to the bulkhead notches, which still need to be cut.
Remy took a trip to Lorient to meet a timber supplier, coming back with good news that we will be receiving a donation of ‘legacy’ stock including, likely, Iroko that will be great for making our deck planking!
Then we met at the yard, glued another beam trough, and set to work on the undesirable task of sanding the Movingui chicken pox off the inner keel, stem and stern pieces — no more hideous air bubbles caused from our epoxy + peel ply mistake we’d made several weeks earlier. Check out our latest full length Boat Build episode below to learn what went wrong.
This mistake and the amount of sanding we needed to do to rectify it was a reminder of how good peel ply is when you don’t mess it up — “without peel ply, I’d quit the build,” joked Remy. Sanding truly sucks.
By Saturday I was ready to pass the baton to Remy, taking a day off to be with Sahara and sending Hunter off to a football tournament. Remy is one of the most hardworking people I know (shhh, don’t tell him I told you) and it’s sometimes remarkable to think that he still has a hole in his vertebrae (the medical term is a ‘bridge’, I think, where the bone didn’t heal as well as hoped…). Don’t worry, he knows his limits, but he’s a tough ole bastard and I love seeing him happy in the boatyard, where he’d rather be than behind a computer in the corporate world!
He smashed on with sanding the topsides of both backbones and cutting the excess off at each end ready for us to assemble the stem and stern plywood. I popped in (of course!) late afternoon to top up the removed screw holes with my needle filled with epoxy and then we glued yet another beam trough. Remember, we have four more to make for the bulkheads 2+5.
Sunday, my spirits were lifted with Australia defeating Turkey 2-0 in their opening World Cup match and a pleasant morning at the beach with Remy and Sahara. We bumped in to Simone and his partner Mel and had a try of the awesome wooden belly boards Simone hand shapes — so much fun and the best way to get barrelled in crummy surf! Check out this fun video about Simone and his stoke for sliding on water by Jonas Hill below.
With both the boys out of the house for football, I stayed home to catch up on laundry and backing up all the footage from the week in the boatyard, along with sitting down to type up this newsletter.
Meanwhile, Remy braved the rising temperature in the yard to take on (one of) the next milestone(s) — cutting the slots in the bulkheads where they will slide on to the backbone.
And that, folks, is a wrap for the week.
Doing these Weekly Digest reports is almost like therapy (ha!) — going through to recap the week helps us to appreciate how much we are progressing. Even if it feels slow and small, the time we are putting in to preparation will save us in the long run, not just in terms of the build but also the longevity of the boat and its overall ability to provide decades of adventures for the FSL community. That sun-downer moment in a beautiful anchorage with many of you fine people is one week closer to reality!
As always, thanks for being here. We do it all again from tomorrow…hehe, stay tuned.
Angie & Remy
