The Northeaster Dory is a carefully thought-out and well-designed kit, but you really do need to build every part of it, and some of the inconspicuous things are remarkably time-consuming.
For instance, flotation. Nobody likes to think about capsizing their boat, but suppose it happens? This is a wooden boat so it
would float -- even when swamped -- but with all the fiberglass it would float very low in the water. So blocks of flotation are necessary to displace enough water to get the gunwales up enough to allow you to begin bailing the boat. But where can the flotation go? The only option in an open boat like this one is to tuck it neatly under the thwarts. And how do you make neat, inconspicuous foam blocks to tuck under the thwarts? You go to your local Home Depot and pick up a couple of 4' x 8' sheets of pink or blue 3/4" foam insulation (thicker if you can find it). Then you cut it into 6"-wide strips, glue five strips together to make a block 4 1/4" thick, trace the shape of the bulkhead onto the block, cut it out, sand it smooth, give it several coats of fiberglass, spray paint it matte-black, and glue it to the underside of one of the thwarts. Repeat five more times!
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| A flotation block -- glued and clamped |
The daggerboard, too, is a bit of a job. Like everything else, it comes in the kit as a bunch of bits and pieces. The basic shape is there . . . but the pieces must be glued together. And then the real shaping begins. All of the rough edges (now made rock-hard by the epoxy glue) must be sanded smooth, including the awkward inside of the handle. To make the daggerboard hydrodynamic, it is shaped a bit like a wing -- bullet-shaped on the leading edge and blade-shaped on the trailing edge. And then it, too, needs several coats of epoxy.
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| The daggerboard -- glued, but still rough |
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| The daggerboard -- shaped, faired, and sanded |
At this point the boat was essentially complete, but the interior had only two coats of epoxy and felt a little like sandpaper when you ran your hand over it. So my next task was to sand it all very smooth (without ever sanding
through the epoxy to the plywood beneath. Then I needed to deal with the vagaries of November weather. I waited for a warm 60-ish day to apply the epoxy, but epoxy takes at least 24-hours to harden and it was going to get into the low 40's at night -- a temperature that can bring the curing process to a halt. So we picked up some shop lights in town and bought some of the few 100-watt incandescent bulbs remaining on the market. This allowed me to rig up a gentle heat-lamp system to keep the boat warm at light. (Such loving, tender care I give!)
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| A Dory -- heated and tucked-in for the night |
Of course, it wouldn't do to have a boat so beautiful dragged to the water on the rusty old flatbed trailer I use for hauling trash and firewood. No, such a lovely boat needs its own all-aluminum trailer (which probably could have been silver-plated for the price I paid!). And, of course, the trailer just had to arrive on the UPS truck as a kit! It took two full days to assemble, and the sparse, baffling instructions led to some under-the-breath muttering and renewed appreciation for the truly wonderful instruction book for the Dory itself.
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| Trailex parts |
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| Trailex assembled |
The finish work of sanding and varnishing all parts of the boat will undoubtedly take time and possibly much of the winter (since I need 60-degree days for varnishing), but the boat is now ready to be used. Yesterday afternoon I was working in the open garage on some fiddly little task when the FedEx truck pulled up. As the driver got out, he exclaimed, "You're building a boat! . . . Wow! It's beautiful! . . . How many of these have you made?"
I took a certain quiet pride in confessing that it was my very first wooden boat.
It's looking great!
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