Provenance

 It may be worth letting you know how Eurydice came to me, and in what form. She wasn’t always the promisingly pretty girl she is now, with her blackened bottom and gleaming blue topsides. We’ve actually been together a long time – about a third of my life at the time of writing this – and we've each grown a lot during that time.

            I was 21 years old when my friend Greg (more on him in a future post) bought two sailboats; one an derelict fiberglass albacore that had been used to train sea-cadets and been auctioned-off, and the other an antique wooden lightning. A night of drinking at his house led to an offer of trade – a gun I owned in return for the albacore. I shook on it immediately and showed-up the next day to inspect my new acquisition (and remind him of the deal, in case the memory of it had worn off with the fumes).

            Being somewhat of a vagrant at the time, I didn’t have anywhere to store the boat, but Greg graciously let me keep it at his house. It was several years before I had a stable housing situation, and my first priority was loading the 15 foot boat into the seven-foot bed of a pickup and driving it home. This earned us a few strange looks as we passed through town, more boat off of the truck than on it.

            I returned to university and a new period of languishing began for Eurydice, but I gave her my attention when I could. First came the sails; there were several tears and holes that needed work. I bought a sheet of sail-tape and followed Greg’s instructions – he used some on his lightning’s sails too, and it worked very wonders on those. I hope Eurydice's sails draw half so well. 

            Next came the foils; and old wooden rudder came with the boat, but no tiller or centerboard. The rudder was fine after a couple coats of varnish. I had an ash stave on hand that I’d been planning to use for a bow, but it turned out to be equally suited as a tiller. 

             The centerboard was a bigger issue, however. Greg managed to locate a pattern from a friend of his, and he cut its shape out of a piece of plywood. After examining photographs and schematics online, I used a hand-plane and a palm-sander to reduce the plywood to what I hope are its proper dimensions. The result is a centerboard that’s probably too fine and sharp for its intended purpose. I tried to fiberglass this and mostly made a mess, but ten coats of marine-grade spar varnish sealed it up nicely. A coat of white paint will make it look even sharper.

             For the centerboard's pivot-point, I cut a length of copper pipe so it extended an eighth of an inch on either side of the hole, then peened-over the edges to create a sort of bushing. Hopefully this prevents the wood from wearing where the axle will pass through it. 

            Her hull was where the real work began, and I’ll get into that in the next post. It’s winter now, and the snow is laying on her deck in much the same way the white paint it going to lay on her in a couple months.