Closer....closer...

It's been hotter than the devils shorts lately here in the deep south, so progress has basically stalled on the Old Dog.  Around here - many miles from the coast or large lakes - sailing is mainly a spring and fall activity.  Winter works too if you have a big enough boat that you aren't worried about accidentally going swimming.  Deep summer, on the other hand, is a miasma of triple digit heat indexes and dead wind.  Not a pleasant time to be on the lake in a sailboat with no shade.  As such, I haven't had too much motivation to work on the boat.

Last weekend I had collected the necessities for a few small projects, though, and with the help of my air conditioned shop I checked a few more things off the list.  I got the license plate mounted on the trailer, put the registration decals on the hull, and finally got a plug to fit the transom drain hole.  The transom drain is awkward - the rudder hardware barely clears it on the outside, leaving no room for an exterior plug.  On the inside there was a screw protruding from the bottom of the boat blocking access to the hole.  The screw attaches the thin metal trim that runs down the hull centerline on the bottom.  I carefully backed the screw out, cut it off shorter and reinstalled it, giving clearance for the hull plug from inside.  I suspect that the drain actually runs above the waterline whilst sailing, but I don't want to ship a bunch of water trying to launch.  I figure the plug keeps me dry while I learn the behavior of the boat.  Come to think of it....I wonder if I should have sealed that little screw when I reinstalled it.....?

Lookin' legal:

The other project was a rear mast crutch for storage and transport.  The boat arrived with the mast roped to the transom at the rear with a throwable seat cushion folded up to cradle it.  It made it home that way but it wasn't nearly as secure as I'd like.  Personally, I can't stand stuff moving around when I transport it.  If I have a truck full of stuff I'm not happy until I can roll the truck over and be reasonably sure I won't lose anything.  Overkill is just enough.

With that in mind I made some brackets from loose bolts I had in the shop welded to pieces of angle iron.  These were then screwed to a nice piece of 4"x1" red oak and V cut in the top to match the mast cross section.  A nice tight fit keeps the mast from rotating.  Although the entire assembly will lift straight up (which could be problematic when the trailer hits a bump), a stiff bungee cord wrapped through the tiller hole in the transom and over the mast should keep things secure.  There's still enough flex in the center of the mast that I may need to do something about a center support as well, at least for transport.

The bungee cord I need to secure the forward gear bags is on there way, along with enough cord to fix the spinnaker pole halyard.  Not that we plan of flying the kite anytime soon with an inexperienced crew of two, but it should keep things a little more organized to go ahead and rerig it.  I've also picked up two nice wooden paddles to serve as alternate propulsion.  There's a small trolling motor on the other boat, but the traveler design on the transom of the Thistle would mean removing the motor and stowing it before sailing.  Then there's the battery to deal with as well.  I'm going to give the old school method a try instead.  I mean, it kind of looks like a big canoe, right?  It should paddle okay.....right? Not that I've ever paddled a canoe, but it can't be that hard. Right? Maybe I should file a float plan this time.

Getting very close to getting the hull wet now.  Maybe we can catch a cool(er) morning soon to sojourn to the wee lake.

Incremental Progress

Not much to update yet, but I have gotten the trailer inspected and tagged, and the registration number decals ordered.  The actual GA registration decals arrived as well, so those can go on too when I put the larger numbers on the hull.  I found a plug for the small drain opening in the transom, but there's a screw sticking up internally that blocks installation of the plug.  The screw mounts the then aluminum keel strip, so I'll need to find a shorter replacement or cut that one off flush with the hull.  I think I probably don't even need one after looking at a lot of pictures of Thistles on the water - the bottom edge of the transom looks to run above surface - but I'd rather have something plugging the hole on my first outing.  Just to be safe.

After towing the trailer to the county sheriff's office for inspection it's obvious that I need some kind of rear mast crutch too.  It bounces and moves WAY too much for my comfort, particularly for an hour drive over rough interstates to our normal water venue.  I'm thinking I'll make something that mounts in the rudder gudgeons instead of the type that sits on the rear grate, just so I can use the cover without dismounting the rear crutch.

So...she's almost ready to splash.  I need to beg, borrow, or steal a couple paddles (or I guess I could just buy them.) I need to run waterproof tape around the tank cracks but I'll wait till just before I take her out to do that.  I'm not overly concerned about sticking tape all over it since I've got to do so much work there anyway, but the less time it's on, probably the better.

Hmm.  I guess maybe I should actually take the sails out and hoist them before dragging it all the way to the lake too.  Sail the old concrete inlet of the driveway, as it were.

Say, does anyone have experience with the internal halyard routing on a  gold Thistle mast, per chance?

Here's a little morning dew on the teak for you:

The Journey Begins

I got started in earnest this weekend.  Two full days of hard labor ensued, but the Old Dog certainly looks better for the effort.  I pulled all the loose pinestraw out and vacuumed it the day we brought her home.  So here's where I started Saturday morning: (as always, click pics for the full size experience)

            

With the help of my loyal first mate (and Admiral, my lovely wife) I managed to get the mast up on the second attempt.  We tied the spinnaker halyard to a long line and she pulled it up from out in front of the tow vehicle while I stood in the boat and planted the mast base.  All whilst making sure the internal halyard lines made it through the mast pulpit.  Not too bad now that we know how.

Holy Bats that's tall.

(okay, it's only 27', but that's 7' taller than the other boat)

Then I pulled the boat into out front yard where I could reach it with the water hose. I used a high-pressure hose end attachment to spray out the inside which made some small progress but not much.  I then mixed up some hydrogen peroxide based Cove Base Cleaner that my company manufactures for plastic cleaning at the strongest recommended 4:1 ratio.  I attacked the inside of the hull with a stiff bristle brush, lots of cove base cleaner, and all the elbow grease I could find.  It worked amazingly well

The most amazing part was how well the peroxide cleaner worked on the teak (with hard brushing, but still.)  Check out the port side grate above verses this:

 In fact, it worked so well on the teak that after scrubbing out the entire boat interior I launched into stripping the fiberglass off the rails because the rest of the wood was looking so good.

Some of that went easily, and some did not.  It took several hours of itchy arms. The wood rails were in decent shape, although the wood was painfully dry.  Either the glue between the rail strips has long since fallen out in places or the glass pulled it out.  Heck, maybe they just weren't real great from the factory or the rails have already been redone by an amateur like myself.  At any rate, they look better than the glass.

What do you do after exposing dry wood? Why, run to the hardware store for teak oil, of course!

And that's after two coats.  I ended up with three + on everything by Sunday evening. Over the course of the weekend I also fixed the trailer lights, mounted the TIN tag, and added the safety chains so it's ready for inspection.  Getting the mast stepped allowed me to figure out most of the rigging as well.  

                        Before                                                 After 

           

Getting a lot closer to taking this Dog to the lake.

Step The First: I just wanna go sailing

In the last post I came up with a first step goal:

Step 1: Do just enough that you can at least take the boat out for a sail or two.  If you hate being on the boat, no need for spending hundreds of hours of your life repairing the boat.


Here's a short list of what that will require:

• Register boat (actual registration decals can wait until I receive the reg sticker in the mail as long as I take the documentation that I did register it)
• Tags on trailer.  Which requires
• Get TIN tag
• mount TIN tag
• fix lights
• add safety chains
• get trailer inspected
• pay for tags
• fix the port side angle bracing on the forward grate
• check that the Anderson bailers work and seal
• Do something about the loose fiberglass on the rails.  Nobody wants to hike out on that crap.
• get a transom plug?  Not sure they need one as the transom may be above waterline.
• Find some way to temporarily seal the interior tanks.  All the tanks are stuffed with pieces of Fun Noodle pool float, so I think it would still have enough buoyancy to stay afloat, but I'd rather not chance it since I'm not very experienced sailing.  Some sort of waterproof tape should work temporarily, and I don't plan on dumping the boat. Heh.
• Find some alternate propulsion.  I use a trolling motor on the other boat when to get on/off dock and if the wind dies, but the traveler setup on the Thistle precludes that. I'd love to set up a single-oar sculling rig over the transom, but the quickest solution is a couple paddles.  And prayer that the wind behaves. 
• Check the rope integrity on the trailer winch.  
• Clean the mud & crud out of the boat.  
• Oh yeah, figure out how the crap to get the mast up and what the rest of the miles of spaghetti in the boat actually DO.

All in all, I should be able to get it out on the water for $100-$150 dollars and a bunch of elbow grease.

Initial Assessment and Goal Setting

My whole purpose in writing this as a blog is to document the restoration of Thistle 2694.  I'm new to boat restoration, fine woodworking, and fiberglass work, so it will also serve as a way for people to (I hope) give me tips and info about what the hell I'm doing.  Not to mention that these boats have history, and a following, and provenance, so maybe it will serve as documentation on this hull in the future.

After looking over the boat for a few days and cleaning out the (55 gallon trash can's worth) of pinestraw I was able to get an initial assessment of what it needed and where I stood.

The Good:

• Hull is sound and seems pretty stiff.  One of the problems with the early fiberglass (FG) hulls is that they get flexy over time.  For this reason, the early formed wood hulls are still prized by the top-tier class racers.  I have zero desire to race, but it's nice to know the hull is capable of being at least locally competitive.
• Sails are in A1 shape.  Like a motor boat without a motor, a sailboat that needs sails is worth less than nothing, at least in the bottom-feeder price ranges I'm operating in.
• Hardware is in good shape, including new-looking shrouds.  All the fittings for the rigging (blocks, cams, cleats) and the metal wires that hold up the mast (shrouds) add up to a lot (LOT) of money when you start replacing. She's missing a couple bits but not much.
• Running rigging is usable.  Not pretty but all functional and solid.  See also lots of money to replace.
• Brightwork (the wood trim) is ugly but structurally sound for the most part.
• Trailer is solid and made it home at near-interstate speeds with no incidents.
• lots of spare parts - brand new set of shrouds, an extra rudder and tiller, parts for the trailer wiring, other stuff
• Have a nice sunbrella cover that needs a few patches but is mostly solid.  Designed as a mooring cover to be used with the mast up.

The Bad:

• Good LORD what do all these ropes do??!!
• One angle brace on the front grate is loose.  Like laying in the bottom of the boat loose.
• The front and rear grates, the thwart, and the centerboard cap are all shedding the last flakes of their varnish.  The wood is all dark gray or black and desperately needs cleaned and refinished.  Some of it is cupped and cracked and will need to be replaced.  That will mean completely disassembling all the woodwork, much of which is epoxied in.
• The teak rails were covered with fiberglass and resin at some point in the past.  They are now shedding this mess with a determined effort.  Every time I get near the boat my forearms end up itching like I've been installing attic insulation.  Plus it looks like pure hell.  If the rails aren't in good shape underneath it could mean building a 20' long template to custom bend and lay up the curved rails from carefully cut 1" strips of extremely expensive wood and then mating them to another strip while gluing everything to the loose floppy hull. Teak is about $33/ board foot right now. Did I mention I've never done much woodworking?
  
• Interior paint is abandoning ship.  At a prodigious rate.  In large flakes that are much like broken glass.  Apparently the original gel coat on the interior was a lovely light blue that was painted over in the past with a sturdy coat of off-white marine paint.  It's decided to retire after many faithful years of service. Mostly a cosmetic issue , but it reveals...
• All the internal tanks are separating from the hull.  The seats, the bow tank, and the stern tanks were created as separate fiberglass pieces and then mated to the hull with resin and filler at the factory.  They serve as flotation tanks to keep the boat from sinking if you get blown over or swamped.  Every tank has at least a few places where the filler is cracking and falling out or just damn gone.  The seats specifically have nice 1/2" wide gaps where they are no longer attached for a foot or two at a time.  None of the tanks are about to fall out, but none of them are sealed either.  Crap. This is going to mean a lot of grinding, fileting, and fiberglassing.  I'll have to cut/grind out all the loose stuff, filet the joints, then lay fiberglass tape and resin all the way around the tanks and to cover the new repairs and reinforce what hasn't cracked yet.  Which probably means repainting the entire interior.  Which should mean sanding all the old paint back to the gelcoat. Crap.
• Transom curl disease.  The transom is a piece of plywood bedded under fiberglass - a thick layer on the outside and a thin layer inboard.  When the glass cracks, water gets in and the wood swells causing the transom to curl toward the rear.  Old Dog has the very beginnings of this issue.  The only real repair is to cut and chisel out the wood and bond in new wood, then reglass it.
• Registration paperwork.  I already filed the state registration for the boat, so no big deal there.  But when I started cleaning I found the hull number in the bilge along the keel line, 2694 in barely legible black dots.  The state registration lists the boat as 2496, so that's not quite right.  It also lists the boat as a 1962 model, but with #2694 (or the incorrect 2496 for that matter) it would have been built in 1968.   Either way, it's pre-1972 when Hull ID Numbers (HINs) were begun, which means a hull number isn't required for GA paperwork so it doesn't really matter if it it's wrong.  But I'd still like it to be right.  I also need to get a set of registration numbers ON the boat.
• Trailer tags.  The trailer has no manufacturer ID number and the PO never tagged the trailer.  That means I have to get a Trailer ID Number (TIN) issued from the local tag office, permanently affix the tag, have it inspected by the sheriff, and take the signed paperwork back to get a road-legal tag.  Getting it inspected means I need to fix the wiring for the lights and put safety chains on the trailer.

Goal Setting, or How Not To Collapse Crying From The Overwhelming Amount Of Work You've Just Bought Yourself.

   Step 1: Do just enough that you can at least take the boat out for a sail or two.  If you hate being on the boat, no need for spending hundreds of hours of your life repairing the boat.  I kind of doubt we'll hate it, but hey, I want to sail!

   Step 2: Figure out how to attack the other issues.  Fixing the fiberglass is paramount, but the boat is really cramped so removing the woodwork may be the best way, but that means doing the whole project at one time.  And how do I clear enough room in the shop to do that?

Act One, In Which The Dog Follows Me Home

After a few weeks of attempting to align our schedules, we finally made it to my friend's house to pick up the boat.  Not to mention see it for the first time.  Excited, yes, and a bit unsure as to what I was getting into.  I had done much research online into what a Thistle was, how they sailed, parts availability, rigging options....anything I could think of.  The opinions of the various online peanut galleries fell into two camps - either "Those are great boats, you'll love it!" or "That boat will kill you and all you loved ones the instant you turn your back!"

For some reason I didn't run the phrase "Thistle Restoration" through my Google-Fu.  Maybe that was a good thing.  If I had only known then....

But I didn't and although it was in a little worse shape than I had imagined through my rose tinted imaginings, we were immediately struck by a guarded fondness for the boat.  Under the effects of time and sun you could still see good lines and a solid hull.  Even the name works and we don't plan on changing it. I seem to have a weak spot for neglected vehicles that still wear traces of their former glory, and I'd be lying if I said this was the first pinestraw covered yard ornament I've brought home.  After pumping up tires and collecting all the loose parts we towed it carefully home.  I didn't think to take any pictures of it as we found it, but I did when we got it home.

Gee, Mom, it followed me home.  Can I keep it pleeeeease?

In The Beginning

What's the most expensive kind of sailboat?  A free sailboat.

That was the first thing that went through my mind when a friend messaged me with a simple question: "Do you want my Thistle sailboat for free?"

Oh boy.  I mean, Oh Boy! Sure!

My first step was to find out exactly how big a hole I was about to blow in my bank account, free time, and life in general.  What kind of shape is it in?  It had set out uncovered for some time at the local yacht club, and so all the teak really needed stripped and refinished, and it was dirty, but it had nearly new sails and all the rigging and hardware was in usable shape.

Okay, sounding good so far.  Now the make-or-break question: Is it on a trailer I can actually tow the 60 miles back to my house?  Yes.

Well.  Sight unseen, looks like I'm adding to the fleet. Let's hope a free Thistle isn't like a low-cost poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

That will bring the fleet total up to...let's see...two.  We (my wife and I) just started sailing last year.  We did so by buying a 1981 Vagabond 14 off Craigslist for $600 including all the original sails and a trailer. It had set out for several years and was painfully dirty but fairly complete.  Sensing a theme here?  I replaced all the running rigging (rope for you land lubbers,) fixed a few baubles, and we hit the lake.  "Firefly" treats us well and has taught us the basics.  She's not going anywhere, but the rigging is fairly simple, so the more complex rig on a Thistle offers a great stepping stone toward larger boats.  Every boat person is always on the quest toward larger boats, be they driven by wind or dead dinosaurs. It's some kind of sickness or compulsion like lemmings always feeling the location of the nearest cliff. So a free boat that's bigger, more complex, and mildly neglected?  Sign me up!

So what is a Thistle anyway?  The cliff notes: It's 17' long, weighs around 515 lbs, and carries 191 sqft of sail (not counting the spinnaker.)  It was designed in 1945 by Sandy Douglass and is still one of the most popular "One Design" class racing boats in the US.  It's fast. tippy, and rightfully terrifying to someone who just started sailing.  The early ones (pre 1960-ish) were wood hulled, but since then they are fiberglass hull with a fair amount of wood trim.

Did I mention it's completely open decked, so that if you get blown over it fills with a tremendous amount of water which is then a royal bitch to bail out so you can get home?

This is gonna be great!


(More info on Thistles can be found in Wikipedia , Sailboatdata (source of image below), and at the official Thistle Class page)