Great Expectations

I can pretty well guarantee that I will never forget the day the plans arrived from Andrew Wolstenholme, yes I was pretty excited to get the tube through the post and pour over them but that's not the reason. It was also the day when I found out I was going to be a grandad. Now of course normally this would be a happy occasion worthy of a drop of sherry, however mum to be is a mere slip of a lass and dad is still a bit wet behind the ears, to say it was unplanned and unexpected is to master the British tendency to understatement, something I've never been guilty of. I'm afraid the Celtic blood in me won through so I was sent out to the garage to rant and rave for a few hours.

I did manage to use the time fairly usefuly, desperate for something to keep my mind occupied I decided to start marking out some templates onto some birch ply I had lying around. Within a few hours I had templates for the rudder, stock and centre board as well as the transom. I later discovered that i'd made a complete botch of the rudder and had to do another one.



All around this time I was still not totally committed to building Coot. I'm in no doubt that she is a truly beautiful design but I did have doubts in my ability to build her. Looking at the plans I realised that Andrew leaves the builder to line her off and decide where the clinker planks should run. This was turning into a bigger task than I had imagined so decided fairly quickly to go for plan B. I would order a set of planks from Alex Jordan once he had completed all the CAD work, which he reckoned would be about September. But in the meantime I could be getting on with all the other bits......