Hey gang, thanks for the welcome back. I had a great time starting with the visit with Karl. That guy can cook! And bake, too. His soup is excellent as are his cookies.
He's just a plain old nice guy, too.
Maine was great. I ate a lobster for Karl out there so I didn't get to eat as many for myself as I wanted to but who's complaining? The weather was a bit warmer than forecast but that just made it nice to be out by or on the water.
We made a pilgrimage to the boat building capital of the world, Brooklin, Maine. The timing was excellent because there was a group of 40 small boats getting ready for the Small Reach Regatta sponsored by WoodenBoat. They sailed and rowed on Eggemoggin Reach for a couple of days.
We didn't get to L-N but instead opted to go for a lobster lunch sail on the schooner Heron, a 52' wooden boat. I think this boat would be interesting to any woodworker for some of the construction methods employed. Although it is a traditional boat built to a design drawn by John Alden in the 20s, it was built using some modern approaches. The frames are laminated instead of sawn and they are joined to the keel with tapered sliding dovetails. The sliding dovetails are definitely out of the ordinary. The deck beams were also attached with sliding dovetails. The rolling bevels on the planking were cut using a tilting head shaper with one man feeding the work and the other adjusting the tilt of the head on the fly. Typically this work would be done by offering the plank up to the boat, checking for gaps, removing the plank, handplaning a bit on the bevel and then heading back to the boat. Using the shaper allowed the work to proceed much more rapidly.
Here's a picture I found showing the dovetailed white oak frames into the keel.
Meeting Karl was the first highlight of the trip. Perhaps the second was meeting some friends I made last fall and winter who live in West Boothbay Harbor when I did some work related to a dock proposal they were fighting. (story's too long to go into but it did involve using SketchUp.
)They are very nice folks and we had a great time. One of them gave us quite the tour of the harbor and part of the Sheepscot River area. After that we had a lobster dinner with lobsters from the neighboring lobsterman. Yum!
Anyway, enough babbling. I'm still working on getting the photos together and I'll post a few when I get finished.
Oh, another place we stopped was Captain Tinkham's Emporium in searsport. If you're looking for old tools, that's the place to go. Check out this link:
http://www.jonesport-wood.com/jwcaptain/jwctetour1.htm