Peacefuljourney

Darn that life is filled with adventures and emotions!
You get it, the little pirate that Catherine was carrying finally get to see the light!

It was not planned as desired, everything started with a routine checkup and end up with lot’s of medications, surgery and days of suffering & resting. Catherine had a pregnancy disease which was getting dangerous for her and the baby, I won’t tell everything we went through but compare to that a crazy storm out there sailing is pure pleasure.

Everything is getting back together now, George-Emry (The little pirate name, Emry for the friends) doing fine and Catherine even if on heavy pain killer can now do things on her own.

I guess life is just like offshore sailing: Being always ready for everything while taking it one step a the time is the key.

All that said it’s a new beginning for the new family, we are slowly learning the new crew joining our team. I am already looking forward to bring him sailing so he can acquire his sea leg before the land one!

Stéphane, Catherine & Emry
(I will put a picture later on, as we just arrived from the hospital)

Have some of you bought the Wooden boat magazine lately? Have some of you noticed the beautiful picture on it? Yes you got it, it is our boat!

This sure motivate us to keep going. Routine is on lately: planking, planking, planking. Our helper left last week and I can do about 4 planks a week which is not bad. Considering the number of planks left there is 10 weeks at least before the end.

Baby coming up next month so we try to push before it show up.

Winter is nice, the month of the snow & calm. All tourist gone, the slow rhythm of back country under way, wood fire in every house and everybody talking about the weather.

Winter is also the season where it’s the hardest to get things done, sun going down at 3hpm, starting to work at -10celcius in the shop while it’s -35 outside chopping wood and frozen timber to work with.

But this time things are different, we have a additional crew with us which greatly help and motivate. Iko a traveler that wanted to learn boat building is with us since 3 weeks now. The sentence that 3 persons are a team is so true, the whole dynamic change and we get a lot more done.

The bilge stringer are now installed, those are 2 long board inside the boat to reinforce the “flat” area. There were quite some work as the first one done broke, and as the only place I could slide those parts in was by the transom. The planking need the transom to be higher to be completed, the transom can’t be completed because of the bilge stringer, the stringer can’t be completed because of reinforcement on the frames to do, which will need major fairing after all.

Now you can understand why it take us so long to be back to planking! The new batch of wood is here and will be reduce in thickness in about 2 hours, we actually only found 8/4 timber (2″ rough cut) but of nice quality. Having them recut will let us reuse the 1/2″ layer on top for other parts of the boat.

From monday we will be back on covering those ribs, with our team it should be lot faster!

Keep in touch.

I am not a writer, never been, never will. Imagine now doing it in a second language… It give you a idea!
What i am doing, well this is the question. Communicating with the new fashionable mean of talking.

Took millions of year to develop a form of spoken language, to make it disappear by the mean of something abstract that people call Internet. My own mother don’t even talk to me she prefer Messenger, I’ve had meeting in jobs via computer where most of the people was less then 20 foot away.

All that to say we all need to learn that new trade of writing. Being not a writer I do not know what to say much on this website anymore, there is no really adventure and I am such into deep technical thinking of wooden boat that it would bored the most polite person if you let me go.

The days are long the progress are slow, a simple sentence of “Broke a plank” doesn’t really explain the feeling and the days spent working on it before. The long 7 days a week work trying to see the end of it, being so deep into a project that you can’t put your mind elsewhere cannot be resume by a picture.

There is always enough progress to keep the hope, but never enough to see the end. Boat building is a long commitment and I understand the sentence of Paul Gartside saying: “Each boat I’ve build for others have taken a chunk of my life”.

Do we regret it? No.
Do we would do it again if we had the choice? We would seriously put more time thinking about it…

The skills learned is not even comparable but does learning a old trade that disappeared by the evolution will worth it in my life, this we gonna see.

Wooden boat are great, strong and low maintenance if properly build. But there is no way you can build a wooden boat as fast as a Fiberglass one, so there is no way they can compete with it and came back in strength.

We shall see…but if I do not update often it’s simply as I do not know where to start.

Take care all.

In our years of cruising, we often meet dream that end up like nightmare.I would say that in every port we have found a couple selling their boat for just a airplane ticket to go home, often when their retirement fund was use to buy the boat.

Please, movie are not like truth at all, and sailing is a skills which even with the fancy electronics of today, can’t be replaced.Learning the hard way is not made for everyone, except for those that love suffering by nature.

I do not say it is not available to anyone, but it need to be learned by small step and preparation. You may wonder why the hell I am saying all that, well this weekend the old boat from a good friend was abandon at sea and badly damage.

Constellation, a Contessa 26, sailed from England to Australia singlehanded with no issue. The new owner that bought it filled with wet dream and no (By the look of the story) experience tried a small offshore passage and asked by Epirb to be evacuated when the boat was doing fine.

Salvage by a fisherman the boat was badly damage during the rescue mission and not before.

You may find myself rude talking this way, but I just have seen enough of people losing a lot thinking that cruising are like movies…  If this is your dream please prepare, try the boat, go daysailing often doing longer trip everytime which will end up as a nice adventure.

You can read the whole story of what happen here:
http://davec-loopfish.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-is-how-it-all-went-down.html

Day’s are passing so fast it make us wonder how much longer we gonna stay here…

Right now we are working on a 38ft mast that we are building for a boat in the area. The work is fun, but it does have taken us twice more time then expected slowing down the boat building.

I’ve been working 13 hours a day since a while now, doing boat work after the mast. I can now say there is 3 planks on both side of the boat installed, which were the longest one on the ship to do. The reason why those where so long it’s because they touch entirely the boat on 13 ft and not just every 12″ like the framing do. This mean the planks need to be perfectly carved with the curves and the twist of the boat and it was quite demanding with quite some cursing I have to say…

Meanwhile, and this is not one of those April fool joke, Catherine really pregnant! We wanted to finish the planking before “working” on that project but adventure had arrived sooner then expected! It’s all good and we are happy, just working harder to get the boat done before the small us decide to see the light.

We moved to a small house with a local friend, which is nice and we can relax more in between the days of work. It’s in a wood at around 10 minutes from the building area. It is also with him that I build the mast and we became quite good friend. He help me on the building once a while which is really nice also, strangely enough we discover that we have the same family name… Maybe that’s why we are so much alike…

Have fun all!

Hello all,

Seems like long time I didn’t write on the website, but also nothing really happen for a long time. The thing is we waited to order fasteners and what needed to finish projects on the boat as it came from the US.

When we finally made that order, Canada post office decided to go on strike and then in Lock out which stopped the project for 3 weeks!

We have now received the planking in beautiful 20ft long board (BC Fir) which we look forward to that step. The screws arrived yesterday and was able to screw 2 planks as they were ready, those are named the stealer.

Most of the floors are done, and now it’s time to cover those rib! We are still missing 1500 pounds to do the ballast so this project will be for later this season.

Here it is, after some long weeks of waiting our Shipmate stove arrived well packaged by a helpful Boater (David Gage) in Florida.

Even with the wood cradle, the foam inside and the bracing it arrived broken. A corner of the stove, firebrick and a important piece inside need repair. I do not know what Fedex have done with it, but it sure wasn’t delicate shipping!

We left the stove at a local welder to see if he can fix it, as Cast Iron is really hard to repair. We were lucky to have furnace cement from our bronze casting to fix the firebrick & I contacted the shipmate stove company if he can supply me the piece inside. Will see how that turn out.

Meanwhile we received the glue to start laminating the floors. Floors in wood boat mean the piece attaching the framing to the “backbone”. We have problem right now with all that, as I need to align the backbone and all the framing before bolting them down. I am using the roof to nail them when they are right, but the problem is the temporary building is moving every time it’s blowing and the soil is too soft because of the snow melting to do anything! A well challenge is what we are use too!

We had wonderful news from the sawmill who made a mistake and miscut too much of a order which is perfect for our planking! Some nice quarter saw BC Fir is coming in a few weeks and will start covering those ribs.

The new website is getting online slowly,
this will bring a lot more features!

I am still working on it, but should be fully on in the next day or so.
I’ve already imported all the old news from 2004 to today.

Hello all of you,

I have to say I am a bit disappointed. Last year in around the same date I’ve been a bit extreme with a news about a fire into the boat building extension. With the result of that new I thought that you guys will remember it for quite a while but I am happy to see not, as this year my lot more soft April fool convinced everyone!

No Catherine is not pregnant yet, and the boat is still our first priority and coming along well! I think next year I should found something more in the middle for a joke as leaving the boat to go
circumnavigate Alaska in a hot ballon .

Life is good here, we bought a new stove for the boat a Shipmate wood stove. You can see one of those at:

http://www.shipmatestove.com/Details.cfm?ProdID=32&category=6

Thanks to David Gage that make this possible, as the stove is in Florida. Dave kindly did the transaction with the person selling it, packaged the 135pounds stove and send it to us. Thanks again Dave!

Catherine put pictures of the neighborhood often for those interested, they are on our website in the pictures section.

Take care all!