We're getting there!

If you missed Sunday's premiere of the documentary Nova Scotia Schooners on CBC-Television's Land & Sea, you can now watch it online at http://www.cbc.ca/landandsea/2011/12/schooners.html

Meanwhile we've been falling behind on posting pictures from The Dory Shop boatyard where the hulls of our twin schooners will very soon be completely planked up. See how small that remaining gap is? Why it's less than the size of Bub's head!

But quality work cannot be rushed and so the date of our shutter plank celebration still eludes us. Stay tuned ~ when we know, you will!

Get a load of the width of this boat lumber!

View from the interior

Shutter plank

It's been fascinating to watch construction of the spring fitted decks of these twin schooners, and never moreso than when those last pieces, the shutter planks, go in. This series of photos shows the process out in the Dory Shop Boatyard this morning. Enjoy!

Beautiful!

Bob Cratchitt hard at work

I've been teasing poor Bub Dares, who's been in religiously this holiday season, comparing him to Ebenezer Scrooge's clerk from A Christmas Carol. Nearly every day over the holidays, Bub has come in to our rather chilly shops, stoked up the fires (at least, unlike Scrooge, we're generous with the fuel!), then sanded and varnished the dozens of hackmatack deck beams that are due to be placed in the twin schooners next week. No, Bub does not have a handicapped boy at home (only his dog Smoke) and Dave hasn't had visions of funky ghosts in the night (has he?).

Perfect plank, beaming boatbuilder

Dave's back from a very successful trip to the West Coast where he finalized the purchase of our planking for these twin schooners.

We're going to be using Alaskan yellow cedar, a member of the Cypress family, known for excellent durability and workability.

Dave was really impressed with the Surrey, British Columbia mill where these giant logs were sawn.

"It was a really professional place, very efficient," he said. But most importantly, he is soooo pleased with the wood.

"It's beautiful stuff, clear...perfect really. As a builder, I'm really, really, pleased. (Editor's note: this by Dave standards is practically gushing!)

The plank, which needs about three months to dry, will be shipped East later this fall.

Work on the vessels, which were framed up last spring and have sat seasoning under cover these last few months, will resume shortly with construction of the deck beams.

Can't wait to see wood chips again!

Frame by frame

We promised these schooners would be twins, built up together, frame by frame, plank by plank, creating a new class of vessels that can genuinely compete. And so the logical next step after installing the first frames on one schooner was to install the same on schooner two, as shown below.

First frames!

A truly significant and happy milestone for this project. But let's let the pictures do the talking this time.

What a difference a day makes!

Yesterday the gang was outside pounding trunnels in their shirt sleeves and talking about starting framing today. The ground was bare, the temperature was comfortably above freezing. Then pow! overnight we got 25 centimetres of snow (that's 10 inches!) and the landscape is completely different. Not that it will stop Dave and co!

Sunny deadwood

Until working around Dave and Dan, I thought Deadwood was a television western. Well that's true but apparently it's also the name of wood that serves primarily as filler between other aspects of a boat's structure. And that's what the guys are working on in the pictures here.

The funny thing is that this deadwood, particularly the piece being worked on at right, has such a vibrant colour. It really sticks out on a day like this when the temperature is back above freezing but everything is that dull gray that tends to characterize Nova Scotia from December until April. Doesn't look dead at all, does it?

Ballast keels arrive

The sun is back out today but it's been a challenging week for getting work done outside. There were snowstorms Monday and again on Wednesday. It drove even our most hardcore guy (i.e. Dave) to work inside by the stove.

Still we managed to get the two ballast keels on site. You can see one of the 11,000 lb. mommas in the photos here. Bear in mind that the keel as shown at right has been flipped upside down. You can certainly get a good sense of how things will fit together.

More photos from the keel laying

From the top:

Capt. Dan Moreland addresses the crowd gathered at The Dory Shop for the December 12th keel laying ceremonies.

Capt. Phil Watson, skipper of the Schooner Bluenose II, drives one of the ceremonial spikes.

Designer/builder David Westergaard tries to hide in the crowd.

One of the mallets and spikes beforehand.

When celebrations continued into the night, one little reveller curled up in our smallest dory for a sleep.