Build It, Sail It, The Ultimate Adventure - The SV Tapatya Story
It Started With A Crate
Those of you familiar with the Miss Molly adventures will remember that Karin and I had rebuilt our first junk rigged sailboat, Miss Molly, and sailed her from Vancouver, Canada down to the wonderful Sea of Cortez. We’d headed back to Karin’s home in Germany for the birth of our first child, Elizabeth, and returned to Mexico and Miss Molly for more cruising delights, this time with a crew of three. To keep a long story short, unfortunately, there were a number of issues affecting our future with the ferrocement-hulled Miss Molly; I had serious concerns about the structural integrity of the hull; like so many people, our finances were seriously limited - I was jobbing, renovating apartments in Germany, which was far from being a big earner, and the marina bills kept coming; and Karin’s family were putting pressure on her to take on a dilapidated house that her uncle was living in and whose ownership was totally unclear. We made the heart-wrenching decision to head out to Mexico one more time, scrap Miss Molly and put anything that might be considered useful into a crate and ship it back to Germany.
With our now two kids (Hazel had arrived!) staying at their grandparents for a fortnight, Karin and I arrived in San Carlos and began to put our plans into action. We’d informed the marina of our intentions and they had been very helpful, suggesting that the bare hull could be taken out and sunk as part of a project to create an artificial reef; something that we felt would be a suitable final resting place for her. We stripped everything out of the boat; I built a plywood crate from various parts of the inner furniture; it was sat on a couple of pallets to make it possible for a forklift to move it when the time came. I also bought a nice sheet of 3/4” ply for the top of the crate to make it all very solid.
With our now two kids (Hazel had arrived!) staying at their grandparents for a fortnight, Karin and I arrived in San Carlos and began to put our plans into action. We’d informed the marina of our intentions and they had been very helpful, suggesting that the bare hull could be taken out and sunk as part of a project to create an artificial reef; something that we felt would be a suitable final resting place for her. We stripped everything out of the boat; I built a plywood crate from various parts of the inner furniture; it was sat on a couple of pallets to make it possible for a forklift to move it when the time came. I also bought a nice sheet of 3/4” ply for the top of the crate to make it all very solid.
Miss Molly hauling out in Mexico
The old Volvo Penta MD1 engine was quite a strain to lift out, but I separated it from the gearbox and, using the halyard, Karin hauled it up, with me underneath lifting for all I was worth. When that was safely in the crate, I took a bowsaw to Miss Molly’s mast and felled it neatly between the surrounding boats to get at the masthead fitting and VHF antenna. Amongst other goodies, the finished packed crate contained the engine and gearbox, our lovely Dickinson Bristol stove, all of the bronze opening ports, the antique bronze beer pumps and handles that were used as water pumps, her switches, battery charger and VHF, the heavy duty, bronze bow roller, stanchions, dinghy and life raft, charts, books, etc, and sadly, a can of West System epoxy.
The trusty Dickinson
I’d spent a considerable amount of time and effort in Germany trying to find a company that would ship a crate as part of a container from Mexico back to Hamburg. That was all finally arranged; the crate would be picked up in San Carlos and driven across Mexico to Veracruz on the east coast and from there, shipped on. Unfortunately, being completely new to the rather dark art of international consolidated container shipping, I hadn’t appreciated the importance of affixing a sign on the crate indicating which way up it should be loaded - I naively thought it was obvious that the pallet should be at the bottom!
Some weeks later, we got the notice that our crate had arrived in Hamburg and that we could pick it up. We drove up to the harbour with two cars and a small trailer, the crate was loaded onto the trailer with a forklift and the poor trailer nearly folded under the weight of the thing. We drove to a spot out of the way, opened the crate and started unloading bits into the two cars to ease the massive overloading on the trailer, and at that point I learnt that crates are packed into consolidated containers any way they’ll fit, especially if the newbie who built the crate omitted the ‘This Way Up’ label. The crate had clearly been stood on its side, the Volvo Penta engine and gearbox had crushed the can of West System epoxy, and this had run out, covering most of the other contents of the crate in a horribly sticky coating of uncured resin. Most of the books were unsalvageable and a lot of the hardware would require copious application of solvent to get the sticky mess off of it! But, we got it home.
Clearly, the shipping of all this old tat to our new and largely derelict home in rural northern Germany had a purpose. I had the crazy dream to build our next cruising sailboat myself and aimed to reuse as much of Miss Molly as possible in the new boat, making her a sort of reincarnation, indeed, of Miss Molly. As no doubt, at the very least, the vast majority of you are aware, Jay Bedford’s sailing dory plans are shown at the back of the wonderful ‘Voyaging On A Small income’, and I’d read the book and perused them there and felt they represented a boat that was both a capable cruising vessel and easy enough for a handyperson such as myself to build. Despite the fact that we were pumping just about every penny we earnt into the renovations of the house that we had somehow ended up buying from Karin’s family, for my 40th birthday, Karin very kindly allowed me to purchase a set of full plans for the 36’ and 37.6’ versions of Mr Benford’s sailing dories.
And that was as far as it went for quite a while.
We had no money. Even the house renovations had to stop from time to time as we waited to earn enough to purchase the next materials. The kids named me ‘Bish Daddy’ because I kept ‘bishing’ walls, chimneys and new doorways out of the old place as the remodelling progressed.
An old mate of mine had persuaded me to return to teaching and we had one year out in Spain as I worked at a chaotically-run private school out there. The school eventually closed, we returned to Germany and I started working as a freelance language teacher, riding my motorbike from establishment to establishment and cramming as many teaching hours as humanly possible into a working week. At one point, I was topping 50 lesson hours a week! The head of English at the local University (Roger) persuaded me I needed to get a Masters degree to get out of the rat- race of freelancing and to get a proper job; I signed on at the OU and three years and a scary amount of money later, I had a Masters in applied linguistics. True to Roger’s prediction, even before I had completely finished the studies, a job ad came up at a Uni (about 90 minutes commute away); it fitted me to a T; I, rather arrogantly, knew I’d get it!
Now, as you are no doubt aware, time was ticking away and progress on the boat building front was non-existent. However, the dream had not died. Some friends were keen canoeists and the local rivers of the Lüneburger Heide are ideal for canoe expeditions. I decided to begin developing my boat building skills with a stitch and glue, plywood, Selway Fisher canoe. We now had 3 kids; Kerry had joined us; and the girls were getting older. I’d bought Elizabeth an old (fifth hand?), East German built Optimist and she’d started sailing in a kids sailing group every Sunday morning on the river Elbe. Hazel was now old enough to join the sailing group and needed a boat. I took patterns by laying sheets of left-over wallpaper on the Optimist we had and we cut plywood to shape to build Hazel’s Optimist. I got a sail on eBay and away she went.
Some weeks later, we got the notice that our crate had arrived in Hamburg and that we could pick it up. We drove up to the harbour with two cars and a small trailer, the crate was loaded onto the trailer with a forklift and the poor trailer nearly folded under the weight of the thing. We drove to a spot out of the way, opened the crate and started unloading bits into the two cars to ease the massive overloading on the trailer, and at that point I learnt that crates are packed into consolidated containers any way they’ll fit, especially if the newbie who built the crate omitted the ‘This Way Up’ label. The crate had clearly been stood on its side, the Volvo Penta engine and gearbox had crushed the can of West System epoxy, and this had run out, covering most of the other contents of the crate in a horribly sticky coating of uncured resin. Most of the books were unsalvageable and a lot of the hardware would require copious application of solvent to get the sticky mess off of it! But, we got it home.
Clearly, the shipping of all this old tat to our new and largely derelict home in rural northern Germany had a purpose. I had the crazy dream to build our next cruising sailboat myself and aimed to reuse as much of Miss Molly as possible in the new boat, making her a sort of reincarnation, indeed, of Miss Molly. As no doubt, at the very least, the vast majority of you are aware, Jay Bedford’s sailing dory plans are shown at the back of the wonderful ‘Voyaging On A Small income’, and I’d read the book and perused them there and felt they represented a boat that was both a capable cruising vessel and easy enough for a handyperson such as myself to build. Despite the fact that we were pumping just about every penny we earnt into the renovations of the house that we had somehow ended up buying from Karin’s family, for my 40th birthday, Karin very kindly allowed me to purchase a set of full plans for the 36’ and 37.6’ versions of Mr Benford’s sailing dories.
And that was as far as it went for quite a while.
We had no money. Even the house renovations had to stop from time to time as we waited to earn enough to purchase the next materials. The kids named me ‘Bish Daddy’ because I kept ‘bishing’ walls, chimneys and new doorways out of the old place as the remodelling progressed.
An old mate of mine had persuaded me to return to teaching and we had one year out in Spain as I worked at a chaotically-run private school out there. The school eventually closed, we returned to Germany and I started working as a freelance language teacher, riding my motorbike from establishment to establishment and cramming as many teaching hours as humanly possible into a working week. At one point, I was topping 50 lesson hours a week! The head of English at the local University (Roger) persuaded me I needed to get a Masters degree to get out of the rat- race of freelancing and to get a proper job; I signed on at the OU and three years and a scary amount of money later, I had a Masters in applied linguistics. True to Roger’s prediction, even before I had completely finished the studies, a job ad came up at a Uni (about 90 minutes commute away); it fitted me to a T; I, rather arrogantly, knew I’d get it!
Now, as you are no doubt aware, time was ticking away and progress on the boat building front was non-existent. However, the dream had not died. Some friends were keen canoeists and the local rivers of the Lüneburger Heide are ideal for canoe expeditions. I decided to begin developing my boat building skills with a stitch and glue, plywood, Selway Fisher canoe. We now had 3 kids; Kerry had joined us; and the girls were getting older. I’d bought Elizabeth an old (fifth hand?), East German built Optimist and she’d started sailing in a kids sailing group every Sunday morning on the river Elbe. Hazel was now old enough to join the sailing group and needed a boat. I took patterns by laying sheets of left-over wallpaper on the Optimist we had and we cut plywood to shape to build Hazel’s Optimist. I got a sail on eBay and away she went.
Hazel's Optimist
Years ago, back in California, I’d told my mate Scott about my ideas to build our next boat. He suggested honing my skills by building a San Francisco Bay Pelican first. I decided he was right and that would be my next build. The Pelican is a 12ft day sailer with lug rig and a small foresail; some are even junk rigged. It proved to be ideal preparation and I learnt a lot about techniques and locally available materials in that build. She’s a great little boat and sails really well!
Building the Pelican - Kerry hard at work!
Time ticked on, the kids grew, and it became clear that by the time I’d finished building the new boat, the kids would be all grown up and off doing their own thing. We didn’t need a 36ft boat. I contacted Mr Benford and he kindly agreed, for a small fee, to allow me to return the 36 and 37.6ft plans to him and to get a set of plans for the 31.8 footer instead. In April 2017, I began clearing a massive pile of rubble (the aforementioned walls, chimneys and doorways!) from behind an old Nissen hut that stands in our garden in order to extend it to be able to build my new boat in (I had already renovated the Nissen hut in question, turning it into a square-sided, wood clad, much more agreeable-to-the-eye construction, however, it still has the original steel arches that form its structure).
The much more agreeable-to-the-eye Nissen hut
One advantage of all of the intervening years was that I’d been able to do an absolute shed-load of research into the building of Benford dories; if it’s on the internet, I’ve read it, along with Pete Hill’s book on building Badger and many other books on home boatbuilding. One build that particularly inspired me was Greg Krivonak’s build of the Benford dory ‘Willow’. What Greg did, that I believe to be unique at that time, was to build his dory using fixed frames and not the temporary frames that are usual in this type of construction. Sadly (to my knowledge) he only got as far as posting the build as far as setting up the frames on his blog (and that blog is no longer online, I believe), but it was enough for me to see the advantages of this approach to the construction and to know that I would do the same.
In late August 2017, once the shed extension was complete, I bought 12 sheets of 1/2” exterior grade pine ply, laid them out on the shed floor and started lofting the lines. The build had finally begun!
In late August 2017, once the shed extension was complete, I bought 12 sheets of 1/2” exterior grade pine ply, laid them out on the shed floor and started lofting the lines. The build had finally begun!
Working from the lofting lines
Build It, Sail It, The Ultimate Adventure - The SV Tapatya Story (part two)
Build it, sail it, the ultimate adventure. Well, I guess that pretty much sums up the motivation behind my decision to build a new cruising sail boat. Before I’d begun my preparations, I’d never built a boat before; I was a capable, jack-of-all-trades, craftsman, but I’d always felt boatbuilding to be a higher level of artistry, dealing, as it does, with curved surfaces, ever changing geometries and a general lack of things right-angular. To build a live-aboard cruising sail boat that would allow us to return to a life afloat and to explore more of our wonderful, watery world seemed to me a truly exciting challenge.
In part one of this story, I’d scrapped our previous junk rigged sail boat and shipped the conceivably useful parts home; worked on my boat building skills by building a mini-flotilla of small boats; chosen the boat I intended to build for our next cruising vessel ( a Benford 31.8 dory with a junk schooner rig); extended a shed in our back garden so my intended vessel would actually fit in it; and finally started the build by purchasing 12 sheets of 12mm ply, laying them out on the shed floor in preparation for lofting the lines.
But before I progress with the build, perhaps I ought to go back a step and say a few words about one other great inspiration. Back in the mid 1990s, cruising the beautiful waters of British Columbia, we’d had the very good fortune to anchor in a bay off Nanaimo and meet Allen and Sharrie Farrell, and to be invited aboard China Cloud. We chatted about living aboard and the simplicity of a well-found vessel, and indeed, lifestyle, and were quite spellbound by the obviously contented and fulfilled life that Allen and Sharrie were leading. Later, I read the two books about their adventures, ‘Salt On The Wind’ and ‘Sailing Back In Time’, and ever since have been in awe of what they achieved with the simplest of tools and materials; for me, an exemplary lesson and a glaring highlighting of everything that is wrong in contemporary life.
In part one of this story, I’d scrapped our previous junk rigged sail boat and shipped the conceivably useful parts home; worked on my boat building skills by building a mini-flotilla of small boats; chosen the boat I intended to build for our next cruising vessel ( a Benford 31.8 dory with a junk schooner rig); extended a shed in our back garden so my intended vessel would actually fit in it; and finally started the build by purchasing 12 sheets of 12mm ply, laying them out on the shed floor in preparation for lofting the lines.
But before I progress with the build, perhaps I ought to go back a step and say a few words about one other great inspiration. Back in the mid 1990s, cruising the beautiful waters of British Columbia, we’d had the very good fortune to anchor in a bay off Nanaimo and meet Allen and Sharrie Farrell, and to be invited aboard China Cloud. We chatted about living aboard and the simplicity of a well-found vessel, and indeed, lifestyle, and were quite spellbound by the obviously contented and fulfilled life that Allen and Sharrie were leading. Later, I read the two books about their adventures, ‘Salt On The Wind’ and ‘Sailing Back In Time’, and ever since have been in awe of what they achieved with the simplest of tools and materials; for me, an exemplary lesson and a glaring highlighting of everything that is wrong in contemporary life.
There’s never not a good excuse to get a photo of China Cloud in an article!
Back in the here and now that was there and then, in the splendour of my metal-roofed, wood clad ex-nissen hut, I lofted the lines. Having marked out a grid of perpendicular station lines and 3 longitudinal lines (base, waterline, upper) in black marker pen, I made the decision to not include the keel in the lofting for the simple reason that I couldn’t have fit the full-sized boat lofting lines plus the keel on the boards that I had available. Instead, given the athwartship flat-bottomed nature of the dory design, I used the lowest point of the chine curve as the base line and, taking the supplied dimensions from the table of offsets (the single most important sheet of the bundle of 38 or so sheets supplied as the plans), and remembering to subtract hull thickness from those dimensions, constructed the full-sized side elevation from that, tastefully drawn in red marker. I superimposed the half plan view on that in green. Once these were drawn, it was easy to construct the cross-sectional station views, using dimensions obtained from the other two elevations. These were drawn in different colours, one centred on each station line.
I now had the required full-sized views of the boat - a side elevation, a half plan view and cross-section views of the hull at every station. The side elevation clearly showed the curve of the stem, and I used the lofting boards as the base to laminate the stem to its correct curvature.
I now had the required full-sized views of the boat - a side elevation, a half plan view and cross-section views of the hull at every station. The side elevation clearly showed the curve of the stem, and I used the lofting boards as the base to laminate the stem to its correct curvature.
Laminating the stem
Now, I need to diverge a bit here. One of the ideas I had in the early stages of planning this boat build was that I didn’t want to use any new tropical hardwoods in the build. Traditionally, boats were built using the woods available in the area in which they were being built and it seems to me that the comparatively recent trend towards using woods that have been sourced from tropical areas and shipped halfway around the world has its issues. However, I was quite prepared to use recycled woods in the build, and had amassed a reasonable collection of pieces over the decades of preparation leading up to this build. Amongst these was a stack of mahogany tongue and groove boards (about 8cm by 1cm by 3m long) that I had had the good fortune to discover put out for garbage collection one morning as I was walking the kids to the bus stop on their way to school. It took me two trips to and fro to collect them all, but collect them all I did!
Returning to the stem construction, I screwed right-angled steel brackets at regular intervals to the lofting boards along the line of the stem, laid a plastic sheet over the whole thing to prevent the stem from sticking to the lofting boards, and laminated 6 lengths (in two batches of 3) of my lovely reclaimed mahogany boards to those using my entire collection of small clamps (a boat builder can never have enough clamps!) and a wonderful glue I’d discovered called Collano Semparoc - a waterproof, polyurethane foaming glue that is absolutely not the same as Gorilla Glue!
Once these had set off, I removed them from the laminating form set up and fixed them to a douglas fir knee, constructed from three pieces of 9cm by 9cm fence post (dimensions from lofting lines). I then proceeded to laminate a further 4 lengths of wider douglas fir to the aft side of the mahogany stem piece. The resulting stem timber with attached knee felt impressively solid. I was pleased :)
As I mentioned in part one of this epic, I had decided to follow the lead of Greg Krivonak from his build of the Benford 34’ dory “Willow” and build Tapatya with fixed frames at each station (a total of 13 frames plus stem and stern post), as opposed to the temporary frame construction method with which most Benford dories are built. The next job was to construct each of those cross-sectional frame pieces, building as many bulkheads, beams and furniture pieces into them as possible. Here, once again, the lofting lines played an important role, as I was able to draw out the various furnishings, fittings, bulkheads and openings required onto the elevations, and consequently plan the station frames accordingly. The frames themselves were built to accurate size by laying them on the lofting lines at each station.
Returning to the stem construction, I screwed right-angled steel brackets at regular intervals to the lofting boards along the line of the stem, laid a plastic sheet over the whole thing to prevent the stem from sticking to the lofting boards, and laminated 6 lengths (in two batches of 3) of my lovely reclaimed mahogany boards to those using my entire collection of small clamps (a boat builder can never have enough clamps!) and a wonderful glue I’d discovered called Collano Semparoc - a waterproof, polyurethane foaming glue that is absolutely not the same as Gorilla Glue!
Once these had set off, I removed them from the laminating form set up and fixed them to a douglas fir knee, constructed from three pieces of 9cm by 9cm fence post (dimensions from lofting lines). I then proceeded to laminate a further 4 lengths of wider douglas fir to the aft side of the mahogany stem piece. The resulting stem timber with attached knee felt impressively solid. I was pleased :)
As I mentioned in part one of this epic, I had decided to follow the lead of Greg Krivonak from his build of the Benford 34’ dory “Willow” and build Tapatya with fixed frames at each station (a total of 13 frames plus stem and stern post), as opposed to the temporary frame construction method with which most Benford dories are built. The next job was to construct each of those cross-sectional frame pieces, building as many bulkheads, beams and furniture pieces into them as possible. Here, once again, the lofting lines played an important role, as I was able to draw out the various furnishings, fittings, bulkheads and openings required onto the elevations, and consequently plan the station frames accordingly. The frames themselves were built to accurate size by laying them on the lofting lines at each station.
Frame number 2 under construction on the lofting boards
Beginning at the forward end, I built the frame pieces one at a time, using douglas fir for the actual frames and 12mm plywood for any bulkhead pieces. All ply pieces were sealed in a layer of 163g/m² glass cloth in epoxy on each side, deck beams were laminated to the curve of the deck crown from 4 layers of douglas fir on a form cut from a piece of cheap pine, and I even went as far as to fit mahogany trim pieces and posts to the bulkhead openings using my stock of reclaimed wood (I had another stroke of luck when it was decided to replace all of the windows in the building where I worked; all of the old mahogany windows were tossed into a skip outside the front of the building and a considerable amount of the discarded window frame wood found its way into the back of my car and into my wood stocks :)
Deck beam lamination
The marvellously exciting day soon came when I had completed all of the 13 frame pieces. Some of them were quite big, which already hinted at the interior volume that Tapatya was to have. Once more, I laid them onto their respective lofting station and marked them all with centre and waterline lines. The final piece of this stage was to construct the stern post and knee, a fairly simple piece as it is straight with the triangular knee attached to its lower end, and another 2 of the lovely 9 x 9cm douglas fir fence posts were shaped to form this structure.
All of the frames are finished :)
The next step was to build the strongback - a solid, level timber structure on which the frames, stem and sternpost could be set up in preparation for planking the hull. I used 16cm by 6cm douglas fir for this, with the thinking that the lumber could be used in the boat once the strongback was no longer needed. This strongback was marked with a centre line and perpendicular lines at each of the stations, indicating the position where the various frame pieces would be set. And indeed, one by one, the frame pieces were set in position, centred on the centre line and with all of their waterlines on a level (I used a 3 metre spirit level for this), with various ugly pieces of scrap wood screwed to them and the strongback to hold them in position. With all of the 13 frame pieces in place, the stem and stern post were fixed in position. The boat was beginning to take shape!
Setting up the frames on the strongback
