Eating the elephant
Day by day we are making progress on Blue Turtle. It’s mostly systems work, and that’s mostly Kevin. I lock in at my desk/galley table each day from 9-6:30 or so, and I am zero help on the boat whatsoever. Things happen around me, so last Thursday, for example, at the end of my workday, I helped bend on our brand new staysail, and we both learned a few things about this particular sail. But still, from my perspective, one minute there was no sail, and the next minute, voila!
Compare that to the cockpit enclosure. This job has been hanging over me, intimidating the heck out of me, and I took measurements and planned and we figured out the color and the material, and then I finally placed the order, committing myself and us to this huge project. I estimated it would take about 60 hours, which I need to fit in around my job that is around 60-70 hours/week right now. Plus the materials are expensive, and I’ve never done this kind of thing before, or worked with these kind of materials, etc.
I decided to start with the biggest part first, last Saturday, in part because it’s the easiest. No zippers or isinglass (the plastic vinyl that makes windows)—just a rounded rectangle with 106 grommets and a cord that wraps it onto the steel frame of our enclosure. I had a good template in the original. I measured and measured again, and cut, and sewed, and happily brought it to the boat for the first test measure, very incomplete but just to get a sense for where the rounded edges would go. That’s when I discovered that I’d looked at the wrong measurements for the width.
Off by about 6” on each side. :( But look at that nice center seam!
I cried, a little. Not with frustration at myself, or really even disappointment. It was the lost time. It was really challenging to sew that much material, and I had to figure out so much as I went along. But the next day Kevin and I took the day to do Porchfest—a local live music event that is found in towns around the country. We pulled out our bikes for the first time in a while, and I truly enjoyed soaking up the warm sunshine and feeling truly relaxed. Friends of ours met up with us and we saw a few performers together. I drank a Cuban coffee (those who know me will be shocked.) We expected Kevin to leave the following day, so our pleasure was definitely influenced by the fact that he was about to head out for a longish trip.
16 yr old singer songwriter Clara Easterlin. I feel pretty confident I’ll be able to say I saw her before she got famous.
Spoiler! He didn’t, at least not for a while! I am sure he’ll write about that.
But over the course of the week, I ordered new material, and yesterday I redid the whole thing, but better this time, because I had a sense for what I was doing and how I wanted to do it. It’s not done, not by a long shot, but it fits, and I’m about 50% of the way there. (Oh, and a bird pooped on my head.) I also started working on the side panels, which are a much bigger engineering challenge for me to use 25 year old warped and shrunken panels as a template. There are zippers and webbing with snaps and hardware I don’t even know the name of. Kevin asked me to figure out how to add in screens as well.
I cut isinglass for the first time after the canvas shop owner showed me a trick for how to do it, and was surprised how readily I could attach the vinyl to it, and was looking forward to sewing my first side panel, much, much faster than I’d thought possible. And as I looked at it, I realized something was wrong. There was no way that this design was going to work. I texted the owners to ask, and they confirmed that yes, professionals use two layers of vinyl, sandwiching the isinglass in between. He later went on to explain that I’d need to orient my zippers in a specific way, which meant that all the dimensions I had were going to be off. I noodled on this for a while, cut some new pieces of vinyl (two sides this time), and tidied it all away to work on later. But I’m noodling on solutions, and I want to make sure that before I cut more vinyl, my dimensions are accommodating the zippers in this new way. (This way accounts for UV damage and wind!)
You see my notebook on the table in the back there—I am drawing everything out so it makes sense to me.
I feel like I’m designing, and I love the challenge, but holy heck am I eating the elephant, and it feels like I’m armed with only a toothpick. I tell myself that I’m grateful that I know how to operate a sewing machine, and I’m pretty good with spatial layout, and growing up the child of engravers did give me some eye as to how these pieces will come together. But the part that feels the BEST out of all of this, is the designing it for the specific purpose of sailing. Learning about the wind direction and the zippers was a little overwhelming, and at the same time, I felt something flip inside me as I realized how different this sewing job is from anything I’ve done before, and it faces a whole different set of challenges, and will keep us safe and protected in a real and meaningful way. My vinyl will meet the ocean!