Seagulls and the Original Name of our Boat

When we bought AtLast, in June of 2010, we brought home a hull with some bulkheads and ballast and that's about it.  Except of course the boat had a name, "Chiang".

Hmmm,  Chiang.   Chiang?  Really? Why did they pick that?  I never felt close to this name. I found it difficult to remember and, well, it's Chinese.  And, while the Chinese have a rich and diverse history, we do not have a connection. This hull was built in America and, clearly, we'd be finishing it here too.

So we thought we'd rename the boat.  We decided on "AtLast" as it highlights several aspects of who we are.  To begin,  both CAI and I are in our second marriages and we both feel that, at last, we found our partner to spend the rest of our life with.  In celebration, we danced our first wedding dance to the classic and eternal song "At Last", as sung by Etta James:

At last my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song
Oh yeah yeah
At last the skies above are blue
My heart was wrapped up in clover
The night I looked at you
I found a dream that I could speak to
A dream that I can call my own
I found a thrill to press my cheek to
A thrill that I have never known
Oh yeah yeah, you smile, you smile
Oh and then the spell was cast
And here we are in heaven
For you are mine... at last!

And then there is CAI's dream.  Ever since CAI crossed the Atlantic at age 14 on the double-ender Albatross, he dreamed to build a boat in the same style.  It was 35 years later we bought the hull and moved it out to Newman Lake.  His dream was starting to take shape, at last. 

And one more thing. It has been 6.5 years so far building this boat.  It will probably be another year or two before we make it out there to really sail her.  When we go, I'm sure we all will be sighing, "at last!"

This name feels right.

But CAI thought it would also be meaningful to reflect the original name in the boat.

We found out that "Chiang" is from Richard Bach's book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  You may recall, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was cast out from his flock for his "misplaced" love of flight instead of food.  Jonathan continued his search for truth and perfection in flight.  In his travels he encountered a wise elder seagull whose name was "Chiang".  Chiang took Jonathan beyond his previous learning.  He said, the secret to move instantly to anywhere else in the world, is to "begin by knowing that you have already arrived."

He continued with his teachings.  "We can start working with time if you wish till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love."  After much practice, Jonathan developed his skills and Chiang left, however not before giving Jonathan one last piece of advice:  "keep working on love."

In reflection of everything "Chiang", we have seagulls accenting the interior and exterior of the boat. 
Here are some examples:

Seagull cutouts at the top of our storage cabinet provide important ventilation.

Ventilation at the bottom.

More ventilation for another cabinet.

And you recall, seagull inlays adorn the companionway hatch.

This is the bow of the boat. The previous owner painted seagulls flying about the leading edges.
We will be repainting the hull and I'm sure we'll do something with the seagulls here too.

Our Table and Saw Stop Table Saw

It's the main settee table.   Or saloon table. The saloon is the main room in the boat. Some saloon tables are gimbled (they swing like our stove).  Ours is not. Our table is fixed to the sole (that's the floor of the boat)  so it does not move then you sail and a big rough wave throws you on the table.  Read it needs to be sturdy.   It's large to serve as a work table, dinner table and small too. Leaves turn down so you can pass by.   In reality it is something between a coffee table and dinner or work table.  

The tabletop is composed of 5 components.  A center console runs the entire length and four leaves fold up/down. Wings underneath the console rotate out to support the leaves.  CAI sketched out a proof of concept last week:

Concept for main saloon table. 
A bookshelf is planned at the far end.

The table will be large for a boat our size!  It will measure 38" x 62" with all 4 leaves in their up position.  The center console will provide additional storage which is accessible from the top. 

CAI finished cutting the tabletop last week and pieced them together for an important fit check shown in the photo below.  The light colored wood is the maple and the dark wood is mahogany. 

Tabletop fit check atop CAI's SawStop tablesaw.

Each of the four leaves must be glued and clamped. Here's the first of the four:

The first of the four leaves.

CAI's table saw is really something special.  It's called a SawStop.  This tool will protect you if you get your fingers in the blade because it stops in an instant if senses skin contact. 

A lot of people manage to get hurt by their table saws. Google reveals there are 64,000 table saw accidents every year. 4,000 fingers are lost.  A friend of ours cut off half of his hand. So sad.

CAI and I agreed that this "finger-saving" saw was worth the extra cost.  See the video below.  If you haven't seen this before, you will be amazed.

The Companionway Sliding Hatch

The companionway is, in a way, the "front door" of AtLast.

It provides protection from the elements, will be lockable to keep out unwanted visitors and will offer a warm welcome to friends and family.   It took CAI several months to build the hatch and then he gave it to me to varnish and paint it. This post illustrates the steps to add the laminate and inlays to the piece I call the sliding hatch.

Double click any image to enlarge it.

The basic construction:  

First, a "Before and After" photo:

Here is the sliding hatch structure, sitting on a bench in CAI's shop.  This is prior to adding laminate and inlays:

A closeup of the final construction is shown below:

Fabrication of the laminate top:

CAI cut the panels or "slats" from boards of black locust using his table saw and
then used a thickness planer (shown here) to cut them to the right thickness.
This is a "gross" cut.

Each slat was then processed through a thickness sander which has
micro thickness adjustments (~.008 inch). 
This tool produces a much better surface finish too.

The slats were placed on the hatch to verify fit.
Actually, you can see the slats are constructed with two kinds of wood.
The lighter wood is the black locust and the dark wood is Brazilian Cherry (aka Jatoba).
That's ANOTHER story.

CAI used epoxy to bond the slats to the hatch.
This "MAS Epoxy" is used all over the boat.
It's expensive, more than $100 per gallon.  We try not to waste any of it.

First he coated the hatch with the epoxy.

Next, he coated each slat prior to placing it on the hatch.

He carefully placed each slat.

Then he clamped the slats in place.
You know now that if it gets glued, ahem, epoxied, it gets clamped.

Additional pieces of wood (20"x1.5"x1/4") were used to spread the clamping forces.

Final inspection of the clamps.  This was left to sit for 24 hours.

Creating the Inlays

The seagull patterns below are being used around the boat, so why not on the hatch????

These were the patterns used for the inlays.

Small wooden seagulls were cut from black locust.

CAI cut the shapes of the seagulls into the hatch using a small router.

5 seagulls were placed in the hatch.

The seagull inlays were epoxied into place.
Lead weights provided "clamping" force while the epoxy cured.

The blue seagulls aren't really blue.  That's just a leftover tape, a visual aid when working the inlays.

The final product:

This is the sliding hatch today, with about 4 layers of varnish.  I found out how hard it is to take pictures of something so shiny!

Companionway hatch for AtLast

 A nice front door if I say so myself!

Extreme clamping, and some insulation work

Two weeks ago I posted a discussion about gluing upside down and clamping. This week CAI is gluing in the framework and paneling around the door to the head. This is an extreme application of clamps, but not that uncommon.  Thought you'd like to see. I counted 20 clamps on the doorway alone.

You might notice the chunks of black foam stuck onto the ends of some of them.  That's so we don't poke our eyes out.

Building up the doorway to the head.

Those chunks of foam are leftovers from my ongoing project of insulating the boat.  It has been frigid here in Spokane.  The insulation means it can now get up to a pretty comfortable 60 degrees inside.  And on the flip side it will keep us cooler in the tropics.  Yay! 

Cutting insulation while using my new selfie stick to "get the shot". 
I can't believe I have a selfie stick.

Here I am in the forepeak again.  The insulation goes on the
underside of the deck as well as on the hull sides.

Our Eutectic Cold Plate Fridge

No, we won't have a dorm fridge in our boat. 

Why?  It's all about power and reliability.  CAI tells me that power on a boat costs about $4/kW-hr.  That's more than 30X what you pay at home which, on average in the USA, is a mere 12 cents/kW-hr.    Based on that, wouldn't you want to conserve?

But we will have a fridge. So instead of a dorm fridge, we are using an "Isotherm 3701" that employs something called a eutectic cold plate and will be installed in a HIGHLY insulated box.  This system is like having a big chunk of ice on the side wall of a camping cooler.  The hallmark of the Isotherm 3701 is that the cold plate will freeze colder than ice.

It can do this because it is eutectic.  Eutectic means it uses two fluids that, when mixed homogeneously, freeze at a temperature lower than either of the two fluids alone.  The freezing point of our cold plate will be 18 degrees colder than ice. Pretty cool.  OK, yes, pun intended.  :-)

As I said our "cooler" box will be highly insulated. It will have 4" thick walls. Let's get our head around that.  Imagine the typical camping cooler.  It's about 36" x 17" x 17" and holds about 3 cubic feet, like a dorm fridge.  If you changed the walls of this cooler to 4"thick, the storage area drops down 65% to only 1 cubic foot.  So the insulation comes at a cost of space but it preserves our precious energy. We aren't sure the final storage volume of our fridge yet but I am expecting it will be about 2.7 cubic feet. 

Our Isotherm 3701 Refrigeration System
(big honkin' insulated box not shown)

So together, the extremely low freezing point and the huge amount of insulation will retain sufficiently cool temps to chill our food for hours after a charge.  Maybe even a whole day.  And this is good because we want to avoid running the compressor because it is such a power hog.  If we are lucky we will be able to run the compressor only when we actually have excess power.

Wait, excess power? Yes.  We have excess power when we are running our engine. And this brings me to another hallmark of the Isotherm 3701.  It actually recognizes when we are running our engine and will automatically cycle on to charge the cold plate at that time.  We might be running the engine to charge our batteries once a day, so this should work well.

If it didn't work this way, and the fridge cycled on and off all day long, it could eat up to 50% of our budgeted battery bank every day.  If we only chill our cold plate when the engine is running, and if we do do this daily, then our batteries never have to power the fridge.  Very very cool. (I like puns).

Here are some stats:

Typically power draw from a boat fridge:	50 to 150 amp-hrs/day
Capacity of a typical car battery:	50-70 amp-hrs
Capacity of a 100W 3ft x 3ft solar panel:	36 amp-hrs  (sunny day)
Capacity on AtLast:	~300 amp-hrs*

*(Actually 600 amp-hrs, but we shouldn't use more than 300 before recharging in order to prolong our battery life.)

A final note.  Our system will be water cooled.  It will dump the heat to the sea water through a hole in our hull.  Ugh.  Another hole in the boat.  I never like holes in the boat but they are a necessary evil.

There are at least two reasons to dump the compressor heat to the water.  In the tropics, when it's 90 degrees, we will avoid heating the cabin with hot air from an air-cooled compressor. 

The other reason is that it increases the efficiency of compressor.  It doesn't use fans and heat is transferred much easier from fluid to fluid than from fluid to air.

Disappointment in the Galley

It's been a slow week for the boat. 

Of course it’s the holidays.  But then it snowed.  And then the snow plow broke down.  :-(    And then our backup, a monster 42" wide snow blower, broke too.  Dammit.  As a result, CAI has been Mr Fixit Guy.  He’s not a mechanic but he can troubleshoot almost anything.  I recall once our little RV refrigerator was on the blink.  After hours of poking around he discovered a carpenter bee had built a mud nest in one of the propane supply tubes!  Clever little bee.

So in additional to the snow storm and the holiday we had a disappointing discovery in the galley. For years CAI has been planning to put a refrigerator/freezer in our galley.  But the other day as he was designing the installation of the system, it all changed.  He came into the house and said to me,

"Would you rather have ice cream or be able to poop?"

Huh?

Long story short, he discovered there isn’t enough room for the refrigerator/freezer that he had planned.  In order to make it all fit, he’d have to get rid of one of our black water tanks. Or he could save both tanks and we would forfeit our freezer (and some storage).  So, therefore his question...ice cream or poop? 

Well if you know about cruising you might argue that sailors dump their black water into the ocean.  That's an infinitely large black water tank, right? Who needs two tanks, right? Wrong. You can dump like that only when you are at sea a long way from shore. When you are in port, you are restricted to using your black water tank and pumping it out when it’s full. Some marinas, like Catalina, CA, are so serious about this that they put dye into your tanks when you enter the harbor.  If you dump your tank everyone will know.  And really, who wants to pollute like that?

All right, so when it’s time to empty your tank you need to move your boat to get it pumped.  It’s not a short 15 minute affair.  So CAI built in a 2nd black water tank to stretch the time between pumpouts.  Good move.  You can see the tank in the image below, outlined in red.

So now the question made more sense to me.  Ice cream or poop.  We settled for poop. 

Next week I'll tell you about our special eutectic cold plate fridge and why we don't just buy a little dorm fridge.