In the beginning

In 1981 my wife to be and I finished a Hughes 31 fiberglass hull, and cruised the BC coast; in 1986, we finshed the interior of a 39ft steel hull, sailed to Hawaii and honeymooned through a couple islands. Then life happened - two kids and jobs taking us across Canada separated us from ocean capable boats. But going offshore in dependable boats was in our blood, and the vision of sailing to Tahiti just wouldn't die - so in 2001 we began building the hull that will finally do that - in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. Construction continues today, in Campbell River BC - so we might not be in Tahiti yet - but we're getting closer!!

March 2018 update - came across Indonesia and the Indian Ocean late 2017, stopped at the top of Madagascar for a couple weeks, then ran down the Mozembeq channel and rounded Africa in Dec. It was a busy time, and DreamCatcher performed superbly under a wide range of conditions - saw white water to my knees at the mast in the Mozembeq, 200mile days in both Indian and Atlantic oceans, spent days under spinnaker working to keep my babe moving in very light winds.

Left Capetown mid Jan 2018, bouncing off St Helena and Fernando de Noronha islands as we ran up and across the Atlantic, landing in Barbados. Going to slow down now, and spend two seasons cruising the Caribbean before doing the Panama Canal. It’s an amazing life.

Nov 2016, Brisbane Australia.....not all that far from New Zealand! Spent bulk of the cruising season in Fiji, finishing with a pretty quick run through Vanuatu and New Caledonia. Boat doing great, still a stand out amongst the cruising fleet.
- if you want to keep up with our travel detail, look for Norm Facey on facebook - waaay easier to do updates with pics with marginal internet.

April 2016, Whangarei New Zealand aboard SV DreamCatcher....It still floats! Did Marquesas, Tuamotus, Tahiti thru to Bora Bora, Cooks, Beverage Reef, Nuie, Tonga and then down to New Zealand. Boat is great - though I do wish I'd gone with unpainted aluminum from a maintenance perspective (find I have to go around monthly to deal with paint chips to keep her rust free).


I loved building, and enjoy telling people "we built this boat" - but take a good look at the price of used boats before you start..... consider boat hunting in the Caribbean, and just sail a nice solid boat downwind - can save 10 years of building!

From raw hull to paint



The 'Missing' years

This is 'interesting', trying to explain how we can go from pulling together an entire hull in 9 months.....and then it takes 11 more years to launch. Excuse #1 - new job/new town. Takes best part of 1/2 year to get settled in at work - and twice that for the family. There wasn't much free boat building time for an extended time. Excuse #2 - no roof. When I did finally get back into working on the boat, I needed a roof - scaffolding for a skeleton, and a couple big tarps over top - looked great - and didn't last a week before a big wind storm (pretty normal Nov through March) picked up the seam between the tarps, and blew them apart. Played around with those two tarps and the seam for a bit - then finally bought a 100ft long tarp, and got rid of all seams. That lasted okay - wasn't until we had one solid tarp over top and an old fish net over that (Wili was pretty proud of getting that for us - cost her a case of beer and a smile) that we could relax when the wind blew - but then the snow didn't slide too well....I spent way too much precious boat building time keeping the cover on. Excuse #3 - and likely the biggest factor - I was having a pretty fine time. We picked up a nice used command bridge power boat, and had lots of visitors - we were out there a fair amount, touring, fishing, vacationing. Helped my son rebuild a car. Got a pilot's licence - did most everything except boat build - guilty!

Did get the skeg and rudder built early on - nice inside the shop jobs: (and it was a great working place in lousy weather)

Rudder and Skeg


 Had a couple components fabbed by a good local machine shop - 3" dia 316ss shaft - keyed - squared off at top, and with a threaded hole in the very top (which has been a god send for rigging it up and down and up into place.
- all one piece, no top of rudder coupling, as it just seemed a bad choice to cut the shaft at the point of highest stress....





Bottom bearing and shoe - very simple and skookum bottom bearing, with a match drilled mild steel bolt block - welded that block all around plus plug welded the top. Way over built, but more to deal with cyclic loading (and possible grounding) than the dead weight of the rudder beginning of rudder assembly


 Roughed together - had to be careful to start at shaft, tack full length, and then pull sides in symmetrically, as the narrow sections were not stiff enough to fully plate one side


I'm a touch over 6ft tall - this is one big rudder - and you really do need a hoist  to move it!











 Skeg was built much the same way, though I reinforced the bottom section with an extra plate vertically inside, and the external bolt bar
 Skeg held in position by a pair of come alongs while working to align rudder tube
In the end I installed the rudder and bearings before welding the rudder post to the hull. - just to ensure alignment.

Partial frame below rudder post is one of two I added - along with extra longnitudinals - to better spread the load of the external skeg on the hull plating. Put a longnitudinal right over the skeg weld on each side, in essence extending the skeg up inside to better tie into the framing.

Easier to see added components below




 In addition to the extra internal framing, I also added extra external reinforcement to the base of the skeg - basically doubling the width of attachment to the hull by running a strip at approx 45 degrees each side of the skeg - with the top of that strip lining up with another longnitudinal - and pulled the two strips together to the centerline to form an extended nose, in order to provide some streamlining to the section. Based upon form following function, it looks good




And finally, to ensure a solid base for the hydraulic steering rams, we tied the top of the rudder post back to the last bulkhead - the rams will bolt to the box section at the back, with the balancing rods protruding back thru the slots cut into the bottom of the circles. The ram force will go into turning the rudder shaft, not flexing the hull!








Keel

We started building the keel in Sault Ste Marie - but ran into issues pulling together the leading edge as designed/pre-cut, so we made a modification - rather than trying to cold form the heavily curved nose, we used a solid 2-1/2" round, and cut back the side plates to suit - makes for a skookum front to the keel!

Above shows the form that we trucked it out in - the good news is that we DIDN'T get around to welding the keel in place in SSM - if we had, getting it out to BC would have been a far more challenging, due to the overall height.


Instead, when we set up the hull in Campbell River, we found some blocks high enough for the keel to just fit underneath - and after welding out the interior bulkheads, skidded the keel into place lying on it's side, flipped it right side up, and kicked it around till it lined up (used lots of come-alongs)

You can see from the photo it was a pretty confined working space.






Once roughly in place, we used a couple jacks to hold it up against the hull while we fine tuned the mating seam - once again, due to great pre-cutting, there was very minimal trimming - did spend time prepping the weld joint in order to ensure great penetration - this is a rather highly loaded weld!







 And, just because it is such a critical weld, I found an interested local professional welder to do this joint - outside was 3 outside passes using stick to ensure high penetration. Inside was another series of passes, and then we tied the keel bulkheads (actually called 'floors' for some reason) into the hull frames - this is one wonderfully stiff unit.






And - we filled it with lead! - well, half way. You'd think that 6 tons of lead would take up more space.



two of 4 pallets of lead ingots - nice working size. 


Ingots loosely stacked in keel - did this to reduce amount of molten lead we had to pour, and thus the amount of heat we exposed the steel to. Just pouring all molten lead has been known to distort the steel. Right here I have to stop to give credit to my daughter, wife, and a small crew of friends - Dave Beulah, Frank Slater and Jim Rae. We had a fork lift on the ground, and a roller conveyor from the edge of the hull to the cockpit. That group hoisted every one of those 6T+ of ingots off the forklift, onto the conveyor, into the cockpit, down into the pilothouse, and either down into the keel, or over to one of 3 stacks inside the hull - they were awesome. And Ali always reminds me "I touched every single ingot that went into that boat!"


Melting the lead I did solo, to avoid poisoning family and friends! I did use a 1/2 face respirator and face shield, on top of having two large industrial ducted fans - one pushing fresh air in the other pulling out - didn't want to kill myself either.

It's hard to tell, but the keel was painted with a high temp epoxy before inserting the lead.

I used a crab pot heater to melt the lead, as shown to the right. Started with this little pot, and ended up with a stainless steel liner out of a washing machine - I could melt a couple hundred pounds at a time - tried a couple fancier handling methods, and ended up just balancing the pot on the edge of the boiler, and pouring it in place (yep, used a lot of protective gear too).
Placed just over 1/2 the ingots in loosely packed, then melted the remainder and poured over - left channels so we could get the melted right to the bottom, and filled all the voids - very nice solid mass this way. Used a Tiger torch to level off the top when all done - note that the nose is more than 1/2 full - Roberts specs were to fill the nose, and step down the fill going aft - there is no lead in the last two keel compartments. This is to counter a stern               heavy tendency of the hull.                                                 Top of bilge shot - note how heat bowed top of                            .                                                                                        frame between my feet - pulled that out when  .                                 .                                                                                        adding the angle iron cross section at floor level


Didn't stop there - needed to seal off the top of the lead inside the keel, largely to keep bilge water from getting down around the lead, but also to ensure that if the boat ever flips upside down, 6T of lead doesn't decide to relocate......and this now connects to the March 2009 beginning of 'Weekly projects" - time to change pages!


2 comments:

  1. Very nice boat there! I am currently looking into different designs and this particular one is on my list as well. At the moment I am working on a sailing ship and we are headed for Victoria and Vancouver next - if there is any chance, would it be possible to come and take a look at your boat? Thank you already, please reply to marinelli.manuel(at)gmail.com

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  2. Sorry Manuel, I never saw your comment till now. Boat is now in Trinidad, happy to show it whenever!

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