But wait! There’s more! Introducing Jeff’s new friend, Tallulah

 I had thought we’d be all done (pretty much) last week when Jeff’s rig came out (and I got a black eye fighting with the boom) but Paul took one of his trips to Maine and came back with a little tender that he actually didn’t want—he was going up to look at a different dinghy which, in his words, was “a real sexpot,” but apparently in need of lots of work.  Now, I have never thought of tiny rowboats as sexpots but that is because I am not one of the maritime elite.  The owner of said sexpot apparently did not want to part with it, but instead led Paul over to another part of his yard where this pretty thing had been waiting for about 5 years for someone to come along and rescue it.

And so, as many boats do, it ended up in my yard.   

 

The man who owned her had us take a photo of the name, which Rhonda and her designer at Boat Lettering to You replicated so that I can buy a vinyl stick-on if I need to, instead of trying to paint it.  At first we thought it could be the dinghy for Jeff Brown but jeezum it’s more that half his size (13’).  Then Paul thought it could be the tender for Peanut, whom you have not met here but which I should probably include here just so you can see the other boat in my yard.

Peanut, whose name we all hate but can’t think of a better one, was built in Noank in 1913 by a guy named Smith and was used as a launch to take the hoi polloi out to their yachts.  It was being offered to the Historical Society and Paul and Bruce went to fetch it from Wethersfield (a town not exactly known for its waterfront) and bring it back home.  We’ve found a slip for it next year, but still, someone has to claim it.  It has a cute little 1-stroke engine in it that has a bit of a compression problem . . . but we won’t go into that now.  So then Paul thought that Tallulah would be a great dinghy for Peanut because its slip will not really be very accessible from land unless you leap over Dave’s boat, and while Dave is a very nice guy and is coughing up the slip, I don’t think he wants much traipsing back and forth across his gleaming white fiberglass and teak decks.

 

So as you can see, Tallulah is very cute indeed; she was built in the early 1930’s and did a bit of hoi-polloi transport herself. 

But time and tide wreak havoc on one’s bones, and poor T needed to swell up to see if she needed any plank replacing.

You will recall I am an absolute doofus when it comes to this stuff.

Paul apparently is unfazed by my continued ineptitude.

But we also have Don, who actually went to wooden boat school in Eastport, Maine (thank the gods) and he looked Miss Bankhead over and we both decided that one plank was so nasty that it had to come out.

 

But first we had to swell her up a bit so I watered her twice a day; Paul put some felt in the bottom and miracles occurred.

Sadly, the offending plank didn’t get any better, plus it was split,  so Don and I took it out—it was all mushy at the stern (which is not too wonderful anyway).

Since I was still a plank-replacing greenhorn I started watching this fabulous guy on YouTube, Master Shipwright Louis Sauzedde, who has this 8 or 10  part series on repairing one of my favorite boats—the Herreshoff 12 ½--remember me drooling about it a few posts ago?  Paul snorted coffee out his nose when I told him this—apparently they wouldn’t be too good around here—they’re designed for lakes or calm water.  But I digress.

Anyway, I am in love with Master Shipwright Louis Sauzedde, because he is so damn cute, and because I actually understand what he is doing. He teaches us how to make a pattern from plywood and then with some sticky white labels and a black marker how to transfer it perfectly onto our wood, which in our case is a big old cedar plank 13’ long that Paul found somewhere.  I don’t ask anymore.  I just marvel. 

Don is going to plane it down, and also has some ideas about how to transfer the pattern but I really like this method.

We’ll see.

So Sunday I started scraping and sanding the bottom just to get all the crud out of the way, and boy was there a lot of it.  Whoever had this boat before us did not scrimp on the 5200.

Here is a view of one side done, one side not. Note Peanut in the background, behind my laundry.

Because it’s been so dry lately, and because Talulah has been upside down for a few weeks, there are some enormous gaps between the planks which really have me scared.  Our new plank will fit well but what are we going to do with these arroyos between the others, especially between the garboard planks and the keel?

 

Jeff, I take back everything I ever said about your bottom.

Stay tuned—this weekend should be plank replacement day. At least one section will be tight, as we sink to the bottom.