Thursday 29 December 2011





Garboards out, Nice hole in the deadwood, On the plus side the garboards themselves are in really good order, Got some measurements so time for timber shopping.

Tuesday 27 December 2011

" Do ye want to make a right job of her "

So first job we done was packed up all the rigging and loose gear, brought it
home and put it away. Next up was to rip out all the fixtures, Bunks, sea toilet
etc and give it a proper inspection,
On doing that Liam stuck his head in for a look and on seeing all her doubled and
frankly quite messy looking frames in her rear quarters asked if we want to make
a right job of it, to which we nodded a "yes" . There goes sailing in 2012.
So whats on the agenda now.
Well with it being Christmas there is not a lot happening at the moment but I did
go down on Christmas eve and done some measuring and documenting of things,
She has 22 sawn frames made up of two futtocks with a butt joint and a doubler,
9 of the lower futtocks are soft or split, we may end up changing all of the lower
futtocks if we decide it would be worth while.
Between each set of sawn frames there are two steamed ones, 40 in all, 10 of these
have doublers and will have to be removed and replaced with new.
The first job and this is a big one, The keel needs replacing. Liam has already
condemned the bow knee because someone has cut the bolt heads off and a notch
has been taken out to accommodate a shorter Keelbolt , We also need to take the
ballast off to replace the bolts through the floors so they will also be out of the way,
Then we will have to see what condition the deadwoods are in and hopefully just
replace the bolts through them but thats probably wishful thinking.
The sternpost and transome I will look at when the keel is done.
So yes we're going down the rebuild route, We hadn't ruled that out anyway and
at the end of the day we feel the boat is well worth saving.
The next thing I'll do is remove the garboards and get a proper look at the keel,
We also need to get the ballast off so we can get her covered up and remove the
cockpit. I can't wait :D

Monday 19 December 2011

Its arrived

Finally after ferry delays and Lorry trouble Teal finally made it to Oldcourt and is now sitting on a forklift waiting for some space to be made.
We started by wedging the car full of all the bits and pieces we could get into it but we'll need another trip to get the rest of it put away.

                    Never saw a boat moved like that before



                  Ken gets to see what I spent his money on :D
                                            

We're going to start by removing the rest of the interior, the sea toilet and the cockpit to make room for
repairing the frames, She has sawn frames with two steamed frames between each of them, a few of the sawn ones need work, two due to rot where the cockpit supports attach below the companionway and a few others have splits, four of the steamed frames in either rear quarter have doublers and we'll probably remove all of them and replace , I'm sure there will be more on closer inspection.
The ballast keel will probably be the first thing to come off, The keelbolts are new by the looks of them but they only go through the wooden keel and that is then separately bolted through the iron floors, The bolts through the floors are a complete unknown and probably 98 years old. Without them the ballast would essentially be hanging from the garboards so we're going to go to the effort now for the sake of it.
Wonder what we'll find in the process ?????????????????????????????????????

Saturday 10 December 2011

Classic boat Magazine

There was this write up on "Teal" in Classic Boat in 2007 following her quick fix and trip to the baltic.
I got a copy with the boat which was nice.

Friday 9 December 2011

Update

Looks like the boat will be on its way by next Wednesday evening, and in Hegartys Thursday morning. Our Christmas present to ourselves for 2011.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Intro



                              This is the long boring bit, My introduction to the blog ,
                                      Its my first blog and our first wooden boat,


This is how it came to be and what we plan to do with our new boat, a 1914 Falmouth quay punt named


“Teal”

I'll build a clinker dinghy I thought, I bought the book, set up a workshop and even dragged some 15ft logs of Larch out the woods. This was the answer, build the dinghy, learn the techniques and some time in the future buy a project boat, Probably a folkboat and restore it. Great
First problem as it turns out, I don't really want a dinghy and secondly I don't want to wait, Not that it
would make a difference as I have no money to begin with.

Finally after many, many a evening sat in Ken's kitchen going back and forth over what we
wanted and how we could possibly afford one, a utterly useless attempt to beat to weather in Ken's
Mirror offshore put the final nail in the coffin and we put it on the market with a rather low price tag
and made a sale, so we now had about half enough money to buy something worth while so the next option was to sell the only other thing I had of any real value and got rid of my van.

A trip straight to Hegarty,s boatyard planted a new seed, maybe, just maybe we could afford a traditional boat, perhaps a Gaff rigger , a prewar Hillyard or something even more interesting,
We heard about falmouth quay punts, Liam Hegarty was expecting to get one in himself but she
turned out to need more work than we were really up to. We watched and waited for something to turn up but lost hope of finding a quay punt and turned our attention back to folkboats and various other
rotting hulks, but not much was turning up and we had become more and more sided towards a gaff rig.

Eventually a boat turned up in Scotland, A quay punt at that, So I made several phone calls and inquiries about transport and decided to go have a look, We narrowed it down to a few dates that suited to travel but on looking at the cost of flights they had sored up, Ken decided to take a quick glance to see if anything else had popped up, and there it was, TEAL just up for sale and at a price we could afford.

I had read about Teal on several occasions but had looked past her as she was way out of our price range but had a very interesting history and a lot of pictures of her looking very pretty under full sail.
Although I had previously stumbled on a forum post saying she would soon be for sale again I hadn't realised that the previous ad was several years older and she now needed work again.

Contact was made and flights booked without delay, I took a one day trip to London where her owner, A very nice guy called Rob collected me a drove me down to Kent to see her.
There she was, just as described and looking surprising bigger than her 21'6” but with beautiful classic lines. Shes a gaff yawl, built in 1914 for a writer named Percy Woodcock and has had an interesting life, she was sailed engine less to the Baltic and spent two seasons there before she was put ashore this time. I won't go too in dept  into the history at this stage as most of it is already available on line and it'll be more interesting when I have got some good pictures and the work is in progress. Any way the story goes on and a deal was made and I flew home ( bit ironic flying to buy a boat that was built long before you could have flown anywhere I thought).

For now thats where the story ends, Hopefully in the next week or two she will be on the back of a lorry on her way to Hegarty's where we can get stuck in and try and bring her back to her former glory
or at least get her back on the water for the time being.


I'll be keeping the blog up to date as we progress from here for anyone who shares an interest.
Welcome along.