Sea Shanty

Thank you to everyone that commented on our last post, so we made a phone call, the wood appeared and when we woke up in the morning the boat pixies had been and everything was finished. OK not quite how it happened!

I called a friend who works in his dad's woodyard and he helped me translate my measurements into wood speak. Timber measurements are bizarre to say the least, lengths appear to be in metres but width etc seems to be in imperial with metric equivalents. Planedwood is measured before planing and sheets are measured in Klingon. Anyway after translation the wood wasdelivered and paid for. Our wood friend very kindly helped us transport the wood along the pontoon and get it all on board, you don't get that kind of service normally. Usually it's just dumped in the car park and we have to move it ourselves and as we're about 300 metres/yards from the car park that adds up to a lot of humping.

OK, wood on board, time to put it altogether. The joists were to lie on the ribs of the hull and then bolted down in strategic places. This is where we found that, although we knew not all the ribs would be level with each other, they seemed to be all over the place. This meant each joist had to be notched or packed to make it level. Fortunately this problem only seemed to be concentrated in one area and the rest went down fairly smoothly. The biggest problem we had was the weather, we had decided to do this on what turned out to be two of the hottest weekends in years. Without any insulation in this area it got hot, it got very hot, it got so hot i'm sure we could've fried eggs an' all that. So we had to take a lot of breaks and have a large fan going full tilt which blew the sawdust around nicely. A bit like working inside a roasting tin that's full of sawdust.

Next job was to get the insulation down between the joists, another lesson learnt quite quickly here. We should have spaced the noggins to be either a full or half length of Celotex/Kingspan/foamy silver stuff apart. Still never mind, we got it right for the rest.

Now the the slightly tricky part, man/woman handling 8x2 sheets of chipboard over an area that is fairly narrow timbers with the spaces filled with deceptive foamy stuff. If you didn't concentrate you could easily attempt to step on the insulation which really didn't want to take any weight at all. Result - some swearing and lurching around with large sheets of chipboard that got heavier as the day went on. But it all went down ok in the end, unfortunately I haven't got any pictures of the finished item yet, but this is only half the floor area so there's more to come.

Anyway you've read all of this and are probably wondering what this has to do with sea shanties. Well we recently bought ourselves a new hi-fi with cd player (yes I know they're soooo last week, but we have a lot of CDs and like playing them). So we were looking through our collection and came across a disc we'd almost forgotten about. A friend of ours writes and plays his own music and as a moving in present wrote a song for us, and with any luck if the link works you'll be able to hear it for yourselves. I've had to save the file as a movie in order to be able to upload it, so you'll just get a blank window with music. I've also found that this relies on Flash, so if your system doesn't support this you'll not be able to play this, sorry.