Restoring Favor: days 3-6

We have now finished laminating up the new gunwales and fairing them. It took a while longer than expected because we had to do quite a bit of adjustment to bring the hull closer to being symmetrical. Then it was time to smooth everything out, which meant several days of working with filler, grinding and sanding. We also bought a set of oars which, like most things we acquire, were a really good deal but need some work.

Here are the new gunwales and the oars. The port side one has already been scraped.

The oars came spray-painted olive drab, which would be fine for a combat dinghy or a duck boat but which is rather less than aesthetic in our opinion. So I made a cabinet scraper to take off the OD paint.

 Favor was lacking a bow eye, so we picked one up and I modified it to fit her bow.

That is where we are at the moment.  Next up is adding the seats and buoyancy chambers.

Restoring Favor: day: 3

On Saturday I started on the actual rebuilding of Favor.

I am using recycled tight-grained Douglas fir for the gunwales and breasthook. The gunwales are being built up out of three 3/8" x 2" strips that I am laminating with polyurethane. First I sawed the lumber to the correct thickness with my brother Jon's help using the bandsaw. It was a bit harder than we anticipated because the wood turned out to be full of pitch inside, which is great for boats but not so good for bandsaws. We had to clean out the entire inside of the saw when we had finished.

Next I made the new breasthook for the bow out of the same wood. It took quite a while to get it fitted to the bow as the surface of the fiberglass is no longer smooth. I used the bandsaw to rough it out, then my 2"x72" grinder and chisels to fit it.

 Once the breasthook was glued and screwed in place it was time to fit the gunwales.The sides of the boat were not symmetrical so I used the new gunwales to fair them back to where they should be. Unfortunately this required the strips to be as thick as possible which made for a bit of a fight to get them fit and bent without breaking them or the hull. Once they were clamped in place I went back and un-clamped a section at a time, applied the polyurethane glue, and re-clamped them.

Here she is at the end of the day.

Restoring Favor: days 1-2

 Today I finally got a break from work while I waited for some materials to be delivered, so we decided to start work on Favor.

Roo loves anything to do with Favor and really enjoys helping on the non-toxic parts.

Roo and Uncle Jon working on the bottom.

 First we scraped all the old paint off the bottom. Scraping was relatively dust-free, but even so, right after this picture was taken, Corrie took Roo away to avoid any chance of problems with paint toxins.

Scraping and sanding

 Here you can see the different steps. The far side hasn't been worked on (except by Roo), the aft section of the near side has been scraped, and the forward section has been scraped and sanded. Sanding was not a lot of fun and made a lot of nasty dust so we set up a fan to avoid breathing too much of it.

Half done with the bottom

At the end of the first day we had the whole bottom scraped and half of it sanded. I managed to hurt my shoulder somehow so we moved on to the inside the next morning.

I used a chisel to clean off all the paint and glue drips from the inside (it looked as if Favor had been used as a drop cloth at some point). You can see in the picture that the hull is not symmetrical and that the curves of the rails are not even. After some debate we decided to remove the rails and seat blocks and start over. Jon was kind enough to lend me his 3 degree cutting tool and I used that and a hammer and chisel to cut the them off.

It proved to have been the right choice. When the rails came off we found that they were cracked and broken in half a dozen places and were the main reason that the hull was misshapen. Once they were out I took an angle grinder with a sanding disc, smoothed out all the rough spots, and faired in all the old joints. At this point I discovered that part of the transom had been painted so I scraped it clean.

Here she is- all clean, smooth, and ready to be rebuilt and restored.

Love Me Tender

Though this whole boat-hunting process, our prayer has been that God would give us favor with the right people. We read somewhere that people buy and sell with money, but God's currency is favor. So each time we make a phone call to a seller, boatyard, or insurance company, or get in the car to look at a part, we pray for God's favor.

Since we purchased Grace we have been looking for a tender for her. We wanted a Fatty Knees/Trinka type of boat but were considering getting a Sabot because they are readily available. We had been haunting craigslist without much success. We did find one dinghy of the type that we wanted, but it was in really rough shape complete with thru-hulls, the kind that are made by rocks and don't have sea-cocks.

Then late Thursday night (or early Friday morning), we found an ad that looked promising. A short phone call and we were off to Paramount to have a look at her.

 The hull is lapstrake fiberglass like what we wanted and at 7'11 1/2" LOA she fits the bill exactly for a tender that can be sailed but that doesn't require registration in California.

 The bad news is that she has led a hard life and will need a fair amount of work. Her thwarts, dagger-board trunk, seats, and mast step had all been removed.  Someone decided she would look better with asymmetric gunwales and appears to have used a grinder to achieve their vision. We will be restoring her most of the way pretty soon and all the way as time and funds allow. Corrie informed me (and I agree) that she needs teak seats and rails as well as a new name. We had wanted to name our dinghy Dúlamán Maorach, Irish for "upstart seaweed", but somehow we thought that Favor would be a better name for Grace's tender, as God has definitely granted us favor through the whole process of Going Afloat.

Corrie and I really like Favor but Roo absolutely loves her.

As a short side note we finished repainting the stove for Grace and, Lord willing, will be finishing the last few repairs on it and converting it from CNG to LPG in the near future. Ohh yeah..... it looks great. We're still deciding whether or not to do gold pinstriping over the black paint. Stay tuned, all four Going Afloat readers!

Boat search: Ended! Grace is ours.

It is official we are the proud owners of Grace, the 40' Mariner. We saw a lot of great boats during our search, (Sea Voyager, Scarab) and several that were less than shipshape, but Grace is far and away our favorite.
For the past week we have been going crazy getting all the loose ends made fast and making arrangements for getting an engine, haul-out, paint, stove, etc. Lord willing we will have everything under control by the time we fly out for a friends wedding in Indiana the beginning of next month, so we can enjoy our time there and come back and start in on the restoration work.

Boat search: Mariner 40', Grace, Avalon

We have been praying that the Lord would show us the right boat. The last month has been a series of minor disappointments. One boat that we had been thinking about that had been on the market for years was sold just before we made the trip to see her. It seemed like there were no options in sight, but that changed on Friday.
I had been working on a long commission:

and finally finished it, contacted the customer and finalized the payment method, so I decided to see if anything had come up on craigslist. The top ad was one I had seen before but it was out anchored off Catalina and so I had passed over it. This time we decided to call and find out more about her.

Grace is a 1965 (I think) Mariner 40' hull #7, mahogany on oak, displacing some 26,500lbs. After talking with the owner we decided to make the trip out to the island next day to have a look at her. The trip over was uneventful. Roo loved watching the spay fling off the bow of the ferry and the seagulls wheeling over head. Jim, a local charter captain and Grace's owner, met us at the dock with an inflatable dinghy and we headed out of the harbor and down the coast to where Grace is anchored.

Being engineless at the moment, she is floating like a cork well over her waterline.

 After boarding and going below both of us really liked the beautiful mahogany interior and the (for the most part) the floor plan.

 Both of us stared thinking,"Wow, look at all that wood work- it probably needs to be sanded and re-varnished..." We shouldn't have worried. Almost all of it is in great shape.

 Roo found his favorite spot, and was working really hard to keep us on course (he's not quite clear on underway vs, anchored yet).
After going over the interior and deck (hearing all the things that needed to be fixed) we decided that it was time to head back to shore for lunch and a much-needed break and change of scenery for Roo.

 We had lunch at the park in Avalon and spent the afternoon walking around the city.
Tip: Get a locker for your bags. It is well worth the fee (we didn't do this till we were worn out carrying the heavy bags we brought). We need to learn to travel a bit lighter. After having dinner we caught the last ferry back to the main land.

 Roo much preferred watching the spray to having his picture taken (even if it was by his new friend from Boston (he has a way with the ladies).

A last picture of Grace as we headed back home.

Boat search: Most Wanted

After research, discussion and a fair amount of legwork, we have more or less narrowed our search to these types of boats(not in any particular order):

1. Sea Witch, by Hugh Angelman, LOA 48', LOD 36', LWL 31', Beam 13', Disp. 22000lbs.

 

Reason: Wide beam, plenty of berths, very salty, fast sailers.

 2. Sea Wolf / Yankee Clipper, by William Garden, LOD 41', LWL 32', Beam 12', Disp. 28100lbs.

Reason: Salty, enough berths, separate shower, lots of seating.

3. Mariner 40, by William Garden, LOD 41', LWL 30', Beam 11', Disp. 26500lbs.

Reason: Large galley, salty, enough berths, good deck space.

4. Magellan Ketch, by Hugh Angelman, LOA: 42', LWL 28', Beam: 11.5, Disp. 16300lbs,

Reason: Salty, decent galley, nice interior details, salty.


While our search is not limited to these models, these are the closest commonly available boats to what we want. The search continues....

Special thanks to sailboatdata.com for help with the specs for these boats