A flower from Portland

Just a flower. A pretty one. From Portland.

Homemade Apple Pie

An apple pie I cooked for Thanksgiving. My neighbor/landlord Trudy invited me to over for dinner with her Daughter Joli and her two kids, Milo and Chloe. Couldn't go without bringing something. Found an old James Beard cookbook at a thrift store a while ago, I had a few granny smith apples laying around and a recipe and a toaster oven. So there you go. I still want to make homemade doughnuts for my class.

Tidelands State Park

Here are some photos from a place just west of Port Angeles along the Strait of the Juan de Fuca called Tidelands State Park. Most people go there because when it is at low tide, there are pools you can look into, teeming with life. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it there for low tide, but it was still beautiful to walk along the shore line. 

This was also the site of military installation during one of the world wars, I'm not sure which. The photo with the family in it is where a cannon used to reside. I believe the sign said it could fire up to 27 miles out and used 16 inch shells. But I could just be making it all up. Its interesting to see these former sites being taken back. 

The last photo is driving back into Olympic National Park.

Lofting, almost done

So this is what our floor lofting looks like. Its not the entirety of the lofting, as that is difficult to capture in a single frame, but this gives you an idea of what we are doing, and the scale, as you can see a silver six inch ruler, and a well sharpened pencil against the lofting.

In the main view, what you are seeing, while looking like a single boat from the rear view, is actually one half of the boat, split in two, to the right and left.

So on the right side you are seeing the boat in what is called stations, 1-4, meaning from the fore to the center of the boat. On the left side, you are seeing the continuum of the boat, from stations 5 to the transom, aft of the boat.

This is not easy to describe, let alone visualize, at least for myself, and by the looks I see on some of the other students faces, they as well.

If you want to drive yourself crazy, you can look at the bottom of the picture, and that is what the boat looks like if you were to cut it in half like a melon, from front to back, than lay it down on its center, looking at it from the bottom of the boat (the part that sits in the water normally), and up its side to where the top of the boat begins. Its taken about two months for that to sink in to my melon.

And if you want to take it a step further, and you cannot tell by the picture, but there is another view to the boat, so you are seeing a minimum of three different angles of the boat, overlaid on each other, but constantly referencing one another so that angles and measurements prove out like a mathematical equation, showing that everything is true to itself.

This is my lofting partner Mark, giving the thumbs up. He's been great at helping me learn more about the lofting process, how to visualize things, and how to be more OCD regarding measurements and markings. He's a good woodworker, so I've been lucky to be paired with him. In the background, explaining shit as usual, is Leigh, our teacher from Massachusetts. He's irreverent and funny and helps us keep perspective when taking this shit to seriously. 

Stumps at Fort Flagler

Heron at Fort Flagler

Non boat pictures

Just some non-boat stuff. The first is a good picture of a banana slug, right outside my door. You can see how it gets its name, as it kind of looks like a rotten banana. You see these quite regularly this time of year as it gets colder and wet. 

Second is of Gus. He often runs out to meet me at night when I come home. Usually he doesn't do this, but he jumped on the hood of my car. 

The third is a panorama of Point Hudson. Point Hudson is basically the corner of where downtown Port Townsend ends, then you begin to head Northwest to Fort Worden and the Strait of the Juan de Fuca. 

The fourth is just a picture of the dock right outside of the boat school in Port Hadlock. Just a pretty day and its where I like to sit on breaks.

Thought it would be nice to put up some non-boat stuff on a rainy day.

Lofting

So we have moved on now from drafting to lofting. Lofting is something where you draft your boat again, but in real scale. To do this we have cleared our workspace of all our benches, stapled plywood to the floor and painted them white.

Next we take our drafts and do them all over again, in pairs, but to the actual scale of the boat. Its pretty cool to see this boat take shape, as lines develop all over the floor. It was helpful to do the drafting first, to begin to get a handle on how it works, as the drafts show multiple angles overlaid on one another. This time its a little easier. It also helps that I have a partner who understands things better than I do, has done some woodworking in the past, and has a bit more acumen with things I struggle with, like getting correct measurements, drawing clean lines, and general understanding. He's a good one to learn from. Marc is his name, a young man from Tacoma. I'll try to take a picture of him, as he is my bench mate as well. Kind of funny, he used to have a screen printing business back in Tacoma. Gave it up to come out to boat school. You hear this a lot from people there, giving up whatever they had been doing, to give this wackiness a try. One guy was a cardiologist. A woman in my class was an archeologist, fluent in French too it seems. People from the IT world. Many transients, people who have been traveling around, working on fishing boats in Alaska and what not. Mostly they just remind me of people who don't fit in easily, accept with one another. Bill Hicks called them the 'People who hate People Party'. They are smart, funny and borderline criminal. My kind of people really.

Anyhow, here is the lofting floor. Its also my class' work space. It is usually filled with about eight work benches or so, but has been cleared out for these purposes. I'll try to get another picture with everyone on their hands and knees working, and one where you might actually be able to see the lines we are drawing out.

Also, in Seattle, there is a non-profit organization called the Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union. It was very close to where I worked when I lived there, and I even walked by one day to see about volunteering. Never happened due to work, but it turns out they have an old ten foot boat they would like to expand to sixteen feet, which is very close to the type of boat we are now lofting. If it works out well, we may be able to have the boat delivered to us and we can finish the boat out possibly before the end of the year. I think this might be particular to our class in general, which would be kind of awesome.

Anyhow, hope all is well. Enjoy.

So boat school is going well. My wood working skills seem to be developing, which means I can focus more on other things like measurements and proportions. I am still behind most of the class, whom are working on toolboxes and scale model boat plans, but that is okay. Are class is fortunate in that we have been having a rotating schedule of instructors, as ours has gotten hurt recently. This means we have been receiving a different approach from several different people, which has been refreshing, our instructor, Leigh, nonwithstanding. Recently I made two spar guages, which are essentially small pieces of wood measured to length like a ruler, 3 or six inches roughly, with nails driven through at precise points. You apply these nails to a long square piece of wood on all sides, making marks with the nails as you move down the wood, the holes forming two straight lines on all sides of the wood. Then using a cutting tool called a planer, you actually shave down the edges of the wood. You go around and around the wood like this until the square becomes a circle. This is how masts and oars are handmade.

The gauges I made came out pretty, but were not precise. When cutting my square piece of wood, the sides were not equal in width on all sides. The planing looked good along the wood, just the distances that were incorrect. So I'll be working on that on Monday, and probably Tuesday.

Otherwise things are good. Fall is here, the grey, cold and rain are coming, but we are still having our share of beautiful days. We have sunny days here and there, and blue skies. I like to sit on the beach, as the school is on stilts, right on it. I've also been walking the beach at night in Port Townsend, which I've always enjoyed.

Here are some pictures:

These are pictures of the shore outside the school. The second is of one of the boats we'll be making. The third is a drafting plan we made. While in the picture it looks fine, in reality it wasn't precise enough. We'll be using these plans to create small scale half boat models.