Construction Log: Fairing the Hull - January thru March 1981

With the Whiskey Plank Party behind us, a super-motivation to get that boat into the water charged us for the next stage of the work.  Pulling together financial records of the year before made us long to be free from paying all that rent for apartment, electric, heat, etc.  The sooner we could move aboard, the better!  
From our apartment above Bob's Super Saw Shop on Cornwall Avenue, we looked down on the open beams of Abrazo's deck.  
We had a long way to go before we could launch the boat; and yet, there's something about the solidity of a completed hull that sparks powerful fantasies about the finished boat.  

Fantasy, of course, was my department.  Diving right into Reality the day after the party, Richard labored with muscle and energy to begin to fair the hull.  

He'd used thicker wood for some planks, where the hull shape had required that he “back out” a portion from the interior face of the plank. "Scrub off the rough edges, " said Bill Modrell,  who advised that the best way to smooth those planks is to use a hand plane at 45 degrees diagonal to the work all around the boat in one direction; and then repeat the diagonal planning in the other direction.

Then you can continue planing the hull fore to aft.

Once the hull was smooth, fair, and bright we made it all messy again, corking the seams and plugging the screw holes.

Richard painted the space between each plank with oil before caulking the seams with cotton.  Day after day his corking mallet rang against the corking iron, as he rhythmically tucked miles of cotton between those planks.
Meanwhile, when the weather cooperated, I worked inside the hull, sanding and varnishing the undersides of deck beams.  That was a job that fed my soul; I could envision those richly varnished beams gleaming in my new living space. 

By January 19th, I was outside the hull with The Boss, sealing each of those corked seams below the waterline with neat cement.

On days when we couldn't work outside, inside work included cutting fir for decking.  We sanded and painted the undersides of this decking with coats of white enamel, looking forward to the brightness this would bring inside Abrazo's hull.

Outside work, corking and sealing the plank seams, went on thru the month of February, interrupted with substitute teaching, planting of peas and onions, and several trips to Seattle to visit Papa-dad Hank, who was suffering a failing heart, and getting ready to put his Seattle house on the market.  One further interruption to the boat-building work was Whatcom County Council's Environmental Impact hearings on a certain huge industrial project at Cherry Point, where Chicago Bridge and Iron wanted to build a graving dock for the construction of off-shore oil drilling rigs. Commercial fishing in the Cherry Point area would be severely impacted if CBI went ahead, and since commercial fish boat owners hired shipwrights, Richard and I were founding members of the protest group called Citizens for Sensible Industry.  Preparing testimony and writing about the hearings occupied a lot of my energies at this time.

Above the water line, we sealed the corked seams with white lead.  By the end of February, I was still cutting plugs at the drill press for what seemed a never-ending task of filling each and every  fastening hole with a yellow cedar plug coated in red lead.  

Richard had turned his attention to the cabin coaming, which he steamed and installed on March 11. 

This next photo is from a little farther along, when Richard had begun to lay the foredeck.  I include it here to show the full shape and location of the cabin, because the boat-builder has modified Campos' original design by moving the foreward edge of the cabin to just aft of the mast.  

In Campos' original design, the cabin extended a couple feet forward, with the mast coming thru the cabin top.  Campos called for special brackets to strengthen the cabin around the mast, but Richard's experience with the Garden-designed schooner Sea Lark had given him a strong preference for a different arrangement.  With the mast outside the cabin, he used a beam-spanning mast partner, along with shelves below the harpin, to reinforce the structure.  This arrangement brought the added advantage of a longer working foredeck.   

With his cabin coaming work completed, Richard grouched at me just a little bit about how much plugging I had left till the last minute.  We were due to return to Seattle to care for Hank, and had to have the plugging done before we left.  We put in a long, long day together, and still had to cut more plugs after dinner.  We finished the plugging job the next morning, Saturday March 14.  This photo must have been taken a day or two before, because every one of those plugs had to be clipped off to match the surface before the hull was ready for sanding. 

On the advice of Bill Modrell, Richard had contracted with the famous Dudley Davidson, aka "The Arm."  Davidson was a one-man business, who'd been wielding a disc-sander on the wooden hulls of innumerable boats in Seattle shipyards since 1946.  Dudley came to Bellingham on March 26, 1981 to make Abrazo's hull ready for paint, and we didn't know till much later that the March/April issue of Wooden Boat Magazine that same year featured an article by Bellingham author Michael Broom called "Dudley Davidson's Secrets" Issue #39 Wooden Boat .

Another reporter's description:  "The guy was about the size of a grizzly bear and about as gruff. He would put on a respirator hood, lift his old metal disc sander and wood a hull in a few hours and leave it smooth as a baby's butt. If you got near him while he was working, you could hear him singing opera at full voice under his hood."  (ron II, on Wooden Boat Forum, 2008)

I don't remember any opera singing, but I do recall that Dudley was a very nice man, whose arms were perfectly proportional to his size, and not the outsized freaks I'd been led to expect!  He completed the finish sanding of Abrazo's hull in less than a day, for which we paid him $160.00!

Alan Slade of Red Star Paint Company put the first coat of primer on the topsides as soon as Dudley's work was done.