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!

Starting the hull

When we were looking at hull designs, radius chine hulls were still relatively new in home built designs - updates were fairly frequent as the kinks were worked out, and versions matured into stable standards. Bruce Roberts had a number of hull layouts bubbling along - I was initially drawn to his New York series, then the Voyager series first cam out, and the lines of the V495 caught my eye; 10 years later, they still do - I love the lines of this hull, and frequently still walk away backwards, enjoying how she looks as I leave.

After Bruce and I settled on the hull version desired, he asked "how would you like this delivered pre-cut in a container, right to your back yard?". This was a relatively new development at the time - and my answer was 'YES!' - I wasn't looking forward to lofting, and expected that a computer developed and cut hull would radically improve the speed  + accuracy of assembly (which was right!). So this hull is actually constructed from European steel, pre-blasted, primed and cut in Demark, then loaded into a 20ft container, and delivered to my building site. Opening a container over 1/2 full of steel that has to be emptied in 4 hours (the truck was waiting to take the empty container away) is a daunting experience - but I'd happily do it that way again. Today local computer driven plasma tables are common, and would save the container loading &  freight costs - but it was still a great way to start.

Here's one example of what we received; in this case, a complete station frame of pre-blasted, pre-primed steel, slotted for longitudinals  In this instance, all we had to do was clean up the slots, and tack the frame in place - on the station lines already scribed on the hull plating! Very little measuring was required, mostly we were verifying the scribe lines against the drawings, or ensuring everything was coming up uniform. 





I started in a vacant building on the outskirts of Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario (yep, started building the beast in Ontario, not BC) in  2001. Though there are pics of the container and the first couple months of piece sorting & frame building at that locale, but they're all hard copy in a photo album (somewhere in the basement). Didn't get a digital camera till we shifted everything into one corner of a big old vacant steel foundry pretty well downtown - boat builder's heaven! Roofed over, bricked floor, industrial power & compressed air and a shared room crane! The room crane was a little rough for fine movements, and subject to other industrial use - so we built our own A-frame to run the length of the hull. "we" being a couple great gents:

 - Steve Dumanski (left), a mill welder that enjoyed teaching me everything I never knew about welding and fitting, and Henry Poleschuk(right), a retired papermaker who adopted the boat (and me) as one of his retirement projects - we had a great time together.




Here's a big shot so you can drool - A-frame on wheels that one guy could easily push back &  forth, with a 2T electric hoist mounted high enough to lift the engine right over the finished hull (purchased on Ebay for a song - I've had a lot of luck on there). In the above you can see the assembled frames against the back wall, plating stacked up in the far right corner, and the jig mounted on an I-beam frame - the floor was no where close to level. Worked out well, as that I-Frame base served as a great flat bed shipping cradle just over a year down the road....And - that's my truck to the right - could deliver parts straight to hull side.

The 15T room crane is shown below, with two large magnets connected, and here moving a welding table (did I mention there was a dozen lying around?) - but with a plate clamp, we could quickly shuffle components from the various piles over to the jig. Kinda big, kinda awkward - but it was still pretty handy.



I have probably hundreds of hull assembly shots stored on Webshots at http://community.webshots.com/user/normfacey   Look quick, 'cause after 12 years of being a good service, Webshots is dying an ugly death Dec 1, 2012 - and you'll no longer have access. At least they've provided enough notice that I can save the pics, and post a small selection here.


Day 1. Feb 24, 2001 -  Steve, Henry & Capt'n Jack were on hand to grind and fit plates. Assembly was rather scary at first, as we placed the main hull bottom plates into the jig - and they just flopped around like they would never ever fit together. At this point everyone was looking at me sideways, while I was going purely on faith "the instructions say....tack it together....it'll work guys, trust me" meanwhile I was wondering if this was really going to work..








So we shuffled the plates around and and brought the A-frame over to give a lift in the middle till we could get a tack on the center line - then two - and by golly it started to stiffen up. That's me  in green  - the guys are laughing 'cause they didn't think I'd fit in the hole... I'm smiling hard because it's working!











Before too long, we pulled it all together....it was a good day.


















After that, it only got better - everything we added just stiffened and defined the hull shape more. This stage of assembly was pretty quick - we were basically aligning the completed frames to station lines scribed onto the base hull plates, tacking them down, adding enough bracing to hold them up, and moving on to the next frame.
Here's my good friend Joe lending a hand - it was amazing how many people showed up to help at various stages

You'll notice in this last pic what looks like a bit of smoke.....that's my breath. 
What I haven't mentioned so far is that there is no heat in this giant building - we're working in an average 10 degrees below zero - goes to 20 degrees below for a couple weeks every year. At least the roof keeps the snow out (how do you like 52 inches in 24 hours?? Sault Sainte Marie = Snow capital of Canada.)



March 30th 2001 - we're just over a month into hull assembly.


Love this shot - nothing phallic here!


April 8th, 2011 - all frames in place bow thru stern, and starting to install deck stringers - took care to ensure the frames were vertical as we tacked some stringers in to line everything up. Everything only tacked at this point, and paying attention to position those where they're easily ground out.




Here's another example of the accuracy pre-cutting provided - another friend, Dave Reynold (also initial investing partner, when we thought we could do this as a business ....ha!) and I  pulled the transom together one evening - two total fabrication rookies. And it looks awesome!



Here's a mistake in progress....
Mistake was fully welding the transom backside before fitting it to the hull. Yep it needed to get done before we tacked the transom in place, because we lost access to several joints - but we lost days trying to get the hull and deck plating to pull into the transom perimeter, effort required because we set the transom perimeter angle too soon. Should have trialed the fit, made some small welds to set the angles, THEN removed the transom to complete the inacessible areas. 
Fought this area in multiple ways right through to finish painting the hull.



Here we're still smiling..... (at least the electric hoist made getting it up and down painless) 




Whoops - it doesn't fit! First time on whole boat. May 3rd, 2001



We did overcome - broke all tacks in hull back two stations, and pulled/pounded transom skirt till we achieved fair contact.
This photo taken May 20th - lost two weeks getting it right.
Morale of the story - when kit building, don't do a final weld till the hull is totally together!


 Deck plating comes next - see 'Plating' page.






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