Building Falcon 2

Building Falcon 2

welders, but I 'fessed up, because, while I knew it
was ugly, I also knew it was strong, and I said so. He
laughed and told me that he welded for a living and
asked if I'd like him to go over the welds, just to be
sure, and make them pretty.

Donny, if that is really his name - I'm guessing - it
seems right, is one of those people that come in and
out of your life for a while and disappear forever.
He's a great guy and did a super job on the welding.
20 years later, I still have not a glimmer of trouble
with this rudder, or the welds. His favorite song was
'The King of Pain', which I might have found odd in
another person, but it fit him well.

With the welding done to a 'T' and satisfied of it's
integrity, I smoothed the welds and sanded the entire

blade section of the rudder, not to a polish, but rather to an 80 grit matte finish. I then painted the entire surface with West
epoxy and sanded through the wet surface to the stainless below with 60 grit paper, allowing the wet epoxy to grip bright,
shiny stainless that had never seen atmosphere. Once the epoxy began to set, I applied one more coat to be sure the entire
surface was well protected. There were a few minor drips to smooth slightly, but nothing more.

I covered a smooth plywood panel with plastic, set the frame on it, blasted a few cans of that 'Great Stuff' type closed cell
minimum expanding foam into all the tiny crevices of the framework, then filled the entire structure, put more plastic over it
and another flat panel, held down with a little weight.

Once it cured and I'd attended to any voids or bubbles, I began carefully coating the entire structure with three or four layers
of 10 ounce fiberglass cloth, taking extra care to double up each layer over the edges and around the top and bottom.
Several coats of epoxy fairing were added and carefully sanded to a smooth, attractive shape.

Something you can see here that was actually done before the foam and epoxy, at the same time as the rest of the welding,
is where I welded a section of 3/8 inch stainless rod completely around the very bottom of the rudder stock. I filled the
grooves completely with weld, then ground and smoothed it to a polished collar that would be sitting in the Teflon bearing I
built for the purpose. The collar prevents the rudder from coming out of the bearing in a grounding or other bad action.

The next project for the rudder was the
design and construction of the lower
rudder bearing assembly. Now, I don't
know if it needed to be as big and strong
and I made it. It is all 1/4 inch stainless
plate, and there are 26 stainless bolts of
5/16 inches by 3 1/2 inches, but for
where it is and what it does, for me to
sleep well, it needed to be that strong. I
made the Teflon bearing out of 2 inch by
5 inch square blocks and bolted it in.

A friend named Charley Hildebrand from
Gloucester gave me 2 gallons of a
military surplus epoxy he claimed was
used to attach the outer plates to
nuclear submarines. One can was white
goop and the other was black. Now, it
makes me think of MarineTex, but at the
time, I thought of it as Alien Gold. I used
it to bed the rudder bearing and also the
bow eye that I made from a stainless
prop shaft. I also coated the outside
surface of the bearing mount with the

stuff to mitigate what electrolysis effect I was introducing with the abundance of stainless below the waterline. The bearing is
perfect.

When I spoke before about the engine mockup and the engine beds, I mentioned that the prop shaft location was pretty much
set and there was nothing to do but work with it. The second picture above shows why. The mold that the hull came out of
had this big notch built into it that was meant to accommodate not only the prop and shaft, but it also had a specially molded
mounting spot for the cutlass bearing assembly. This made locating the engine straightforward, but to this day I wish I'd been
able to locate the prop at least another 6 inches deeper in the water. I hate it when the prop comes out while motoring over a
nasty chop in an exit channel, but at least the diesel fuel control doesn't allow the engine to race when it happens.

ground. Most everything of use had already been
stripped, but I was able to make use of the four-bladed
prop and the 'packing' style cutlass casting assembly. I
cut two blades off the prop with a hacksaw, then
ground and polished it into the fine mantelpiece you
see here. This monstrosity worked excellent, except
that the boat went backward while in forward gear and
vice-versa. The boat made prop wash like a tug as
soon as it was put in gear, at idle.

The cutlass bearing was a whole different animal.
Instead of a new style bronze shell with a vulcanized
rubber insert that supported the shaft, it utilized about

Ed Wolfe, another friend and accomplished
racer from Salem, gave me this old
Weedless prop from an ancient Navy
launch. I had it reconditioned and installed it,
but I never used it. For one thing, once I did
all the math, it was way too steep for the
boat, with a pitch of about 22 inches. I
needed half that. Secondly, I got confused
on the shaft rotation or the gear selection
and thought it was the wrong rotation. It was
right hand and I thought I needed left hand.
Truth be told, there was no way to know
until I was in the water and moving. I
discovered that the Hurth gearbox whined
pretty good in reverse gear, but was smooth
and quiet in forward. I actually found that out
in East Boston a year or two later.

So, out in the growing junkyard there was an
old wooden lobster boat rotting into the

25 wraps of wax-impregnated flax cord. The outboard end had a bronze washer that prevented the wraps from being pushed
out of the packing tube when applying tension to the inside water flow adjustment. I suppose the system worked just fine if
the rudder were two feet away or something, but with my rudder, steering the boat in either direction forced the prop to one
side or the other and the result was a pretty scary growling of metal on metal that rang through the boat as the prop shaft
rubbed against the retaining washer. I eventually replaced the whole assembly with brand new stuff, but it was unnerving
listening to that rumble and wondering when the shaft would break off.

When I sorted out the lumber that I stripped out of the old metal building, one of the stacks was of this 1 inch pine planking. In
this area of the loft, the floor was covered with a solid inch of Bondo and paint dust due to many years as the storage area for
an auto body shop below. I would remove some plywood decking, creating a hole in the second floor, then toss down dozens
of old fenders, molding, headlight assemblies and other crunched car parts, also covered with dust. Next, a big floor broom
and sweep the incredible cloud of noxious dust through the hole and into the breeze running through the lower floor with the
big doors opened.

Once the dust settled, I carefully removed the planks, about twenty or so at a time, then I carried them to the boat shed and
pulled all the nails and stacked them up. When it was all over, I had a huge pile of good pine planks. They were still so dirty
that I had to plane them to see what I had, so I planed both sides of every plank and then sorted them out.

Some were of poor quality and riddled with knots, so they ended up as battens and braces on the shed, but others were
straight and strong with only tight knots and not many of them. Since the wood had been in the building for some thirty years
or so, I knew it wasn't going to shrink or check on me.

I began fitting the first planks for the bulkheads as in the photo above, making the best possible use of the wood in respect to
the slope of the hull. The tops of the planks were epoxied and screwed to the finished deck framing, and the bottoms tied into
the bilge framing. The angle of the cross laminations was determined by the slope I'd calculated for the deckhouse sides.
Between you and I, I still like the way it looks from the outside, it works good from the inside, but open portholes shout 'RAIN
IN ME' with a slope like this. Oh well, you can't have everything. Every plank was carefully fitted, epoxied and screwed
together. The bulkheads finished to a solid 1 1/4 inches and have always been stable and extremely strong. They 'ring' when
you give them a solid thump with your knuckle.

Naturally, I spared no effort in leveling the boat once more - - well, I should say, in 'checking the level' as the last several
times I did it, the hull was not in any need of correction. In the photos above, a critical eye will notice that the laminations
aligned to the deckhouse side are all identical, but those set by the slope of the hull vary. Since the precise angle of the cross
laminations was not very important, I didn't see the need of complicating the job by matching them.

All these bulkheads were filleted to the hull with epoxy thickened with finely sifted sawdust and colloidal silica, then
fiberglassed with several layers of epoxied 1708 biaxial fabmat tape 6 inches wide. When they were all completed, it was time
to cut doorways and such, and begin laminating the cabin roof beams. I'm sure they have a name, like 'carlings' or something,
but when you're working alone, you never have to say to someone, "Hey, ahh, go get me the carlings." So I never bothered to
memorize all the proper names for all these parts. I also noticed that hurting myself and saying, "Ouch! I bumped my head on
a roof beam." Never made it hurt any different. When people point at things and say, "What are those?" I say, "Something I
made for the boat. They do stuff." I'm careful not to talk over their heads. It's impolite.

Let's see, now, where was I. Oh, yeah, I just noticed something. When you blow up these photos I have on this section (most
of them anyway) the quality is not that good. I had to reduce them in size (bytes) to allow the pages to load fast. Sorry. They
are just meant to help illuminate my muddled recollections of things that happened years ago. I can also see that I will have to
go back over this all once it's completely loaded, and edit the rambling, sometimes disjointed, writing. But for now, try to bear
with me while I wrestle this project onto the pages. Next item.

I had to have a nicely curving cabin top so Falcon wouldn't be made fun of by the other classic boats, so I took a very nice
piece of strapping and held it on the side of one of the extra large beams, then tacked in three nails to bend it into a nice
curve. With that, I traced the curve and cut the beam. I covered it with plastic and bored 1 1/2 inch holes through it to
accommodate the 'C' clamps I'd used to clamp the beams. Next, I made a nice big pile of 1/4 inch thick by 1 1/2 inch wide
battens of clear, semi-hard Douglas fir and laminated up one beam each day, using West epoxy. I'd already determined the
lengths I needed, so I sort of just made them all a little long. These items were much stronger than I thought they would be. I
actually got the idea from churches. You have to do something in church as a child. I studied the wood.

Once again, another facet of the project brought another challenge. The shape and construction of the cockpit presented
decisions that had to be made and stuck to, such as the slope of the sides and the method of lamination. It began as a single
layer of wood, then I doubled it up behind and fiberglassed over the surface seen here several times. The far end was just a
fun adventure of tapering narrow planks and beveling their edges, and making two identical - one for each side - (sometimes
more than once) until I got that perfect shape. In the end, it was worth it. Here you can also see the 4 inch inside diameter
tube I made and glassed in over the rudder post It has a foam seal at the top.

The waterline is just about where the rudder tube connects to the
hull, so I made quite a build up of fiberglass when connecting the
tube to the hull, but I was also concerned about the possibility of
water sloshing in during severe heavy weather. I crumpled up
some newspaper and stuffed it about four inches down into the
tube, then waxed the shaft up real good. I might have waxed it
first, I forget. Anyway, then I injected that dense foam into it and let
it cure for a week or so. I trimmed off the excess and cleaned up
the shaft and moved the rudder. No sticking, no problem,
acceptable solution. There is another big Teflon bearing in the
deck framing that supports the top of the rudder post. It has been
about 20 years now and there has never been a bit of trouble with
these bearings. Of course, it helps that I've hardly been able to
use the boat, but Falcon has been in the water with me living
aboard for 16 of the past twenty years, and about half of the time
that I have been out with her has been in moderately severe
weather. The rudder has always rotated as smooth as glass
without a bit of slop or rattle. I can't stand a loose rudder.

The photo to the right has a lot of things going on. In the left foreground is
part of the mainmast compression post being fitted. I selected some of the
heaviest, hardest, clearest Douglass Fir from which to fashion the
compression posts. Yes, I know about keel-stepped spars and deck-stepped
spars and blah blah blah - spare me arguments for keel-stepping. They leak.
They leak. And, they leak. Not to mention, they break! Right off - bang - at
the deck, after a horrendous roll or pitch-poling. Now, many of you might be
saying, "Wake up! What you just described is the end! You're in survival
mode from then on out!" Not so. If Falcon rolls, the oversized, stiff spars are
not likely to buckle or break. If she won't right herself, a race along the cabin
side with a serrated knife will sever the lanyards between the deadeyes and
the rig goes overboard, to hang on the other side deadeyes and act as a
sea anchor. When the weather eases, I can drag the short spars back
aboard, and re-spar her exactly as she was, only needing to replace the cut
lanyards from one side. What some call the end, I call the middle of the fight.

I have practiced raising my sticks, alone, in the water, and have always
succeeded, even once with winds up to fifty knots. I've done it now about a
half dozen times. The fact that the short spars of a schooner is truly what
makes it possible is only another reason for a schooner. I don't believe it can
be done aboard a 33 foot sloop, by anyone, unless it is a pathetically short
mast, and then it really isn't a sloop - it's a motorsailer with an oversized
gin-pole and a steadying sail. Well, okay, I DID see a massive pedestal
system on Irving and Electra Johnson's 45 foot steel European Canal
sailboat, but that's an exception.

So anyway, the other things in the photo are the companionway openings is cut, and the laminated roof beam is still a solid
piece during installation. I forget if I cut it before or after starting the cabin roof laminating. The engine cowl opening has
always been a sore spot for me. I know it is big and oddly shaped and ugly, and that it requires some sort of mutant cover
assembly, but it sure makes working on and around the engine easier. It is one big hole, being about five feet high and just as
wide.

I very carefully marked out the doorway (what are they called, anyway?)
openings, then traced a 7 inch sanding disc to round the corners. It
seemed to work pretty good. This bulkhead is getting the first roof beam
attached. All inside bulkheads, like this one, eventually got beams
attached to both sides. The reason being that I knew I would eventually
be installing insulation and finished ceilings inside and would need
attachment points along all interior bulkheads. Oh, I forgot, the
compression posts are laminated into the bulkheads with one beam 2 1/4
inches by 5 inches on each side, resulting in a post 5 inches by 5 and 3/4
inches. The aft section of the one seen in the photo above can be seen
here, as well as the aft section of the foremast compression post, through
the forward doorway. It is directly below the inboard end of the bowsprit
beam.

Another huge project that was going on inside the shop and eventually
out into the yard, was the making of the deck and cabin roof laminations.
This was a huge process of selecting the right beams from the Douglas
Fir - it had to produce quartersawn blanks of 1 1/8 inch by 13/16 inch
when finish planed, then cut and plane several thousand feet of this until I
was neck-deep in shavings and sawdust. Next, I made a cart, 40 feet long
by 3 feet high that was a reinforced 12 inch by 12 inch 'L' shaped wooden
angle covered with plastic. When that was ready, I made a small scarfing
jig to produce identical cuts on the ends of the quartersawn strips and
commenced to epoxy them into 40 foot stringers, wrapping the joints with
Saran Wrap and tape for clamping, and filling the entire cart in a single
session, finally lashing the bundle tight together for additional clamping

as the whole thing cured. I timed certain things like this to
accommodate the size of the job and the need to time. In
this job, I did it on a cold day, outside, using West System
tropical hardener, which wouldn't cure until I'd wrapped the
entire load in clear plastic and let it sit in the sun for a
while. It also enhances the penetration of the epoxy into
the wood. When I finally opened it up and tested the joints,
I could hold a 40 foot strip like a giant fishing pole in a
huge arc and the joints held just fine. All they needed was
a bit of quick palm sanding to smooth the epoxy. Naturally,
because the cabin roof was only 16 feet or so long, none
of those were scarfed, they were selected and put aside
for the job. The very longest were needed for the outside
edges of the main deck.

Here began another of those, 'first this, then that, then
this', algorithms that actually become the easiest way to

accomplish a task. First, I got the roof
beams installed and smoothed on top on
the companionway bulkhead, the aft
saloon bulkhead, and the forward saloon
bulkhead. Then I clamped on the two
outermost cabin roof stringers, measuring,
marking, and even lashing a 'clamping
cord' of sorts between the two forward tips.
When I was sure of the position of the two,
I secured them with epoxy and 2 inch 316
Anchorfast ring nails. Then I notched the
most forward roof beam into the fore and
aft bulkhead that separates the head from
the galley area forward, and secured it as
well. Driving the difficult nails into this hard
wood in a situation like this required that I
support the roof beam with something
every time. My favorite support was a 12
pound sledgehammer resting on my knee.

With the two outermost stringers in place, the other two forward roof beams were notched and glued and nailed into position.
This was the first time I was able to get a 'mind's eye estimation of what the cabin roof would look like. I would build the
forward end of the roof out over the foredeck, then calculate an appropriate curve and cut it off.

Now the cabin roof started clicking along and visitors began to stop by more often. For some reason, the molding and
lamination processes happening at this stage fascinated people who didn't know anything about this or have much interest in
it. Each strip was epoxied and nailed both to the roof beams and each other. If I said I hit my epoxy slippery fingers with a
slippery hammer a thousand times during this entire operation, it may not be an exaggeration. I know of times when they were
so sore that I took to holding the nails with needle nose pliers. In the second picture above, once the triple stringers on the
outer edges were cured and solid, I positioned and installed the remaining roof beams. At this point also, I decided on a larger
roof beam at the forward edge of the companionway hatch opening and laminated one up of 2 1/2 inches by 2 inches,
substantially larger than the 1 1/2 by 1 1/4 inches of the others. By this time also, I had cut away the middle of the aft roof
beam and framed in the companionway hatch opening. I notched and added two small roof beams between the
companionway side frames and the outer edges of the cabin roof.

Once the roof laminating really started moving
along, I clipped off the outer tips of the roof
beams and matched their angle to what the
cabin sides would eventually be. It was a little
odd to be standing inside the unfinished belly of
the boat and begin to see decking growing
above. Eventually I had to sand all of these
bottom surfaces to remove the odd drip and
bubble of epoxy.

There were times when it didn't appear that I
was getting anything done, but one strip after
another, herring boned together in the front, and
the cabin roof slowly filled in. One element that
surprised me a little, probably because I never
really thought about it, was the extreme rigidity
the structure took on due to the curvature and
the direction of the sticks and the grain. It was
almost a compound curve effect, though I knew
that couldn't be true because the surface could
have easily been coated with plywood, though it
would not have been anywhere near as strong.

I reached a point where the only thing I could do was to shape a single 'kayak' king piece and install it in the center. After
everything cured fully, I gave the top a good sanding, squeegeed epoxy over the surface and into any residual cracks, and
repeated the process until I had what you see here. It was so good looking that it was a shame to cover it with fiberglass cloth.

With the experience and success of the cabin roof behind me and all the 40 foot stringers I could want waiting right outside, I
swung into the deck with gusto and determination, seldom stopping to take a picture. Luckily, I did have a couple. There
really wasn't much to say about this anyway. It was simple, straightforward and had little to go wrong. It was just a long,
tedious job. It did have with it, however, one of the few really significant sensations of reaching a destination point. The boat
began to show herself as a real vessel with a finished product in sight, however far down the road.

Much of the beauty of these long, strong strips was how easily they lent themselves to installation and what a strong, flat
surface they rendered once installed. I used 25 pounds of the stainless ring nails by the time it was over. There were a
couple of small areas on the main deck, such as just forward of the cabin and just aft of the cockpit, that required a bit of
patience, but they were small areas and went fast. I rounded all the edges going over the sides and into the cockpit, to ease
the application of fiberglass as soon as I could get to it, but just now another problem had come up.

The deal I had with Cary Nebelkopf fell apart as soon as I'd finished his Cadillac restoration. The deal was, I got to finish the
boat if I first finished his car. I finished the car and he began to fake mental illness and business stress and attacks of anxiety,
all of which were somehow related to my being on the property, so I had to go. The plain truth is, it was his property and with
or without the sniveling, I had to go if he said so. We had nothing in writing. I counted my blessings for getting the time there
that I did and prepped to go.

The two boys are my sons, Ben and Matt. They were 12 and 10 at the time. Ben is practicing 'skulking' and Matt thinks if he
ducks the camera will miss him. They are both grown and married now.

I've worked with this hauling company before. They are Jocelyn Trucking from Newburyport, Massachusetts and they have
always been fair and professional. They brought my hull from Rhode Island to Lynn, then came and launched Falcon. The
guy knows how to operate a hydraulic trailer and no doubt about it. In just a few minutes, Falcon rolls out and I drive to the
ramp to wait for her. A few minutes more and she's backing down toward cold deep wet.

I seem to appear normal in the first picture below, but in fact, I'm having some sort of seizure. I can't move my arms and one
leg keeps going pogo on me. It passes and I climb aboard and rig a mooring pennant in the second picture. Ben is helping
and Matt's already aboard, blowing up his secret inflatable life vest.

Though I had nowhere to go, I installed the
necessary thru-hulls and valves and began hooking
things up. I needed a head on board. Check. A sink
drain. Check. Engine raw water inlet. Check. And
transom exhaust fitting and bilge pump fittings.
Check. Check. The hull was so thick I saved the
plugs for years to show people. I wired up the
engine, got a battery, and fired it up just to be sure.

I prepped and sealed the entire hull, then primed it
and applied bottom paint and topsides paint. Falcon
has always been this color. It just fits and I've always
liked it. This paint was a two part Interlux urethane
enamel. The white bottom paint has since become
illegal, but it was a TBT based Interlux ablative
paint. It worked REAL good. Too good, apparently.

As the time neared for me to leave, Cary became so borderline hysterical that he finally told me to just leave everything I
didn't want and he would take care of it. I could just KICK myself for not having had a couple of dozen burned out cars
delivered to the spot. All the same, I tore the shed apart just enough for the boat hauler to get in and lift Falcon, tossing the
big doors and all extra stuff anywhere in the lot. You can see there are no sides to Falcon's cabin. I filled her with all my tools
and every last item I owned or thought I might be able to use, including the big black and white tarp on the top of the shed.

This was the night before the hauler came to launch Falcon. Now, here is a little item that only someone who has done this
can really appreciate. As I lay there at night trying to sleep, a few ridiculous images kept swimming through my head. One
image saw Falcon so overweight that she slid off the trailer and sank like a rock in the launching ramp. Another showed her
so bow heavy that the prop was high out of the water and the bowsprit was almost in. The third had Falcon squatting in the
stern so hard that water came in the exhaust, over-powered the waterlock, and filled the engine. None of these images would
go away. I spent a long and almost sleepless night. I told the boys about my concerns, but also that it was more a case of
mindless heebie jeebies than scientific probability. The 8600 pounds of lead ballast in the keel said that part of the boat
would be the lowest, and the 3500 pounds per inch buoyancy of the boat at the waterline said it had to float right. Now, all we
had to do was toss it in the drink and see if we were full of crap or not. If not, we could swim ashore like nothing had
happened and make believe it was someone else's boat. They agreed that was a good plan. Matt thought he might wear old
clothes and a moustache so no one would know who he was.

A little more stuff to move and Falcon sees the light of day for the first time. By now, I'd tacked a blue tarp over the cabin to
protect the inside from rain as best I could. A friend named Don Huston, who owned the oldest restored Friendship Sloop I'd
ever heard of, offered me his mooring to use for a while.

Now, you can't see it from here, but straight away behind Falcon, not more than a quarter of a mile, is a public launching
ramp on the other side of this little tip of Lynn Harbor. That's where she's going in, so it won't be a long road trip.

This is where it got spooky. We're in the water, the engine is running, in reverse and revved up and it won't move. I'm
thinking, "Oh no! It IS too heavy! It's gonna freakin' sink!" The truck operator is yelling, "What's wrong? Back off!" He drops
the trailer one more fraction and Falcon glides smoothly and easily away. Horns and whistles start blowing blow and one
lobster boat fires off bottle rockets and Roman candles. I look around to see dozens of people have come out in their boats to
watch the launch. I forgot how many people had been coming by these past two years as I built her and it never occurred to
me that word of the launching would spread like it did. Ben and Matt beamed and Ben leaned over the bow and called back,
"It's sitting perfectly level, Dad! Perfect!"

I put it in forward and motored slowly toward Don's mooring, waving and grinning to the people cheering and clapping around
me. It seemed to be a very good day. In the last picture you can see Don in his Friendship sloop with some others, a dingy
with two people following us, and some of the other boats around have people in them.

I tied Falcon up at the mooring and went back to shore with the boys to get together with some others and say, "Yeah, yeah,"
and nod a lot. My ex took most of these pictures and got them to me later.

Life on the mooring was a strange mix of good and bad. The good? Privacy, peace and quiet, ability to work without
interruption, and it was just so freaking good to be in the water. Now the bad. It was November, cold and blustery and getting
worse. Boat wakes made working on the deck while I tried to close in the cabinsides a real thrill a minute. No electricity. No
heat. No phone. No TV. And no light after dark. I had to row an old plastic dinghy that was given to me because it wouldn't fit
in the dumpster, back and forth a half mile each way to the launching ramp. On my last Saturday night there, some scumbag
stole my oars and I had to row back to Falcon using two 2 x 4's I found on the beach. Halfway out the plastic dinghy cracked
from the left oarlock to the keel and started to sink. The wind was coming straight from the direction of Falcon, which made it
hard to row into, but offered a little shelter once I got closer. Every time the cracked dinghy rode up over a wave, it opened up
and more water came in. It was near midnight and the harbor out here was pitch dark, but I could see the boats and kept
pulling straight for Falcon. As I neared and got out of the wind, the last hundred feet or so went quick and I just scrambled
aboard as the dinghy sank. I think someone from Hollywood must have seen that event because I saw something like it at the
beginning of the first 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' movie.

One sure thing about getting the cabin closed in was that it was sure to be warmer and less windy inside at night. The
battens on the inside in the lower right hand photo were temporary and were later replaced with full planks that were fitted
from the top of the cabin to the bottom of the beam at the bottom, including notching in around the roof beams. The two
layers of wood with the grain in 90 degree offset made the cabinsides a little more than 1 1/2 inches thick of epoxied
lamination. It's strong and warm.

I knew when I was doing this that I would have to trim off all
these edges by hand with a handsaw while lobster boats and
power cruisers waked Falcon into a frenzy, but I could see no
other way to shape the cabin properly. At least I had a little
ridge to hold onto while I was cutting, working my way forward
on each side, then I held onto the mast that was tied down on
deck as I got to the front of the cabin. Little by little, I got it done.

The Sunday morning after the dinghy sank, I was sitting on
deck wondering how to get to shore, when my friend Dana
showed up from Boston Harbor with his shops tow boat. And, I
might add, hot Dunkin Donuts coffee and donuts. It took us
about 37 seconds to decide to drink our coffee on the tow boat
while we dragged Falcon to a new berth in a new marina in
East Boston.

It was a beautiful, sunny day and the only thing we couldn't
figure out was why Falcon kept trying to pass us. I realize now
it was due to a powerful cross-current from the incoming tide,
but at the time I was worried that I'd somehow built a weird
curve in the keel or the boat or something. Still, it looked great,
and by now, you can see that the cabinsides were trimmed and
the edges rounded. Now she's got that 'boat' look coming on
and the 'kit' look is fading.

You GOTTA love it when a marina lets you move in with nothing but a promise to pay someday. I was so destitute that I had
to get food stamps to eat and this was one brutally cold winter. Five people died of exposure on the streets of Boston in
December alone. I stretched tarps over Falcon to keep the snow off the deck and mitigate the possibility of leaks through the
newly finished laminations. I slept in doubled-up sleeping bags with doubled-up longjohns and watch caps under hooded
sweatshirts. It was cozy, and I had a little TV with Rabbit ears. What man could want more?

Too many books. Most of them were about boat
design, rig design, power systems, sails, heavy
weather, cruising stories, hull design and materials
and on and on. I used them like textbooks and
mined out the nuggets I needed, generally
investigating the books from cover to cover to see
what was in there and whether or not the author
was really bright or just in the hunt for nuggets of
his own in the form of royalties. There is a good
deal of that in any book market. Some of the most
technical books seemed for a while to be beyond
my comprehension, the math and theories being
fairly complex and using a lot of calculus for proofs,
but as I kept these for years and watched the
America's Cups boats evolve well past these
theories, I discovered them to be among the most

unreliable. 'If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.' Of course, the formulas for righting moment and
stability are reliable, but even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes. The oldest rules worked best. Whet it doubt, build it
stronger. If it looks wrong, it probably is. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. If you throw it out today, you'll need it tomorrow.

I used a lot of epoxy thickened with microlight and colloidal silica to fair and fill in minor irregularities that might become
bubbles beneath the layup. Every nail or screw head or tool dent or tiny dig was filled and sanded, then the fiberglass was
applied. I'd stretch a single piece of cloth from the front to the back of the boat along one side, with 6 inches hanging off the
edge, then carefully massage it to a perfect fit around every curve and crease, then begin mixing the west and wetting it out,
squeegeeing the surface flat and not allowing resin to puddle. Next, the other side, then down the middle. Every part,
including the cockpit all the way down to the hull.

After some fairing of the seams and a little smoothing, the second layer was applied side to side. The third layer was applied
the same as the first and the entire surface was coated with thickened epoxy and faired. I can promise you, none of this has
ever leaked, even a drop. Okay, okay. One stupid bolt from my anchor davits had a small leak, but really, you got to expect
something somewhere to drip in a boat. I should have been more careful bedding that when I installed it. Besides, that
installation was done when I was rushing to get out of Naples and up to St. Petersburg.

With blood as thick as maple syrup, I tore the covers off Falcon long before the first stout boaters showed their shivering
pasty white faces at the boatyard and got started with the prep and fiberglassing of the entire cabin, deck and cockpit. This
was all done with three layers of ten ounce cloth and West epoxy, as though it were one big piece, which, in my mind and
concerning leaks, it was. I had long ago bought the entire roll of cloth in anticipation of this. It was 5 feet wide. After sealing
and re-sealing and shaping the entire top of the boat, after smoothing and rounding and shaping every corner and edge and
curve, not only so the fiberglass cloth would lay around them, but so the entire boat would take on an artistically aesthetic
appearance. It had to look right. Sharp angles and corners wouldn't do.

1989