Vanya's Boat

http://picasaweb.google.com/crumlives/VanyaSBoat?authkey=wafQVHPTjiI

These are some pictures of a boat that I am building with Winter and Vanya. Winter is a wooden boat expert and afficionado who seems to me to be in his 60s but I am told he is older. Vanya is Heidi's cousin who I am pretty sure is 17 or maybe 16 and I of course am 35 so it is truly an intergenerational project.

Vanya, like all 16 year olds, has been pretty busy so I'm helping out with some of the not so fun for 16 year old parts of boat building. (Those parts are very fun for Winter and me though.) We are going to leave the painting of the boat to Vanya. I know that he is quite an artist so it may be a fantastically original paint job.

If you look at the pictures you can see that it has been an interesting job. The main problem, well there are many big problems, but I think the main one is that the directions are nearly indecipherable and the schematic drawings have been downsized to the point where you can no longer read the numbers. The guy who wrote the directions, Jim Shotwell, is a great and kind guy but clearly is not great at translating his great knowledge of boats to text. So I have basically been progressing to make it look boat like. The other problem with the decking of the boat is that they sent the plywood pieces in sections that were not the full length of the boat. This meant that there is a seam in the middle of the long axis, a seam that does not match up with any of the structure of the boat. Design grade = D-.

As with any project I have learned many things that I could do better the next time around. Things that I can't fix on the current project but could fix at some future point. Sorry about that Vanya :)

Oh-for anyone that is still reading--the picture of the Lake George House was my idea of a joke. It is the biggest house on Lake George and owned by one of the owners of the Red Sox. Our house is wonderful beyond belief--but slightly smaller.