It's A Puffin'!

The Puffin, The Center for Wooden Boats' 100-year-old steam launch, had a shakedown cruise yesterday after a thorough renovation.

It's A Duck!

Thanks to Ever Capable Driver Kemp and a crack crew of Brooke, Michael, the Erics, Sterling, Beth, Bridget and Jeremy. This is Mistral's first Duck of the year and second overall.

Good Wind Tonight

It looks like Mistral should have good wind in the Duck Dodge tonight.

Three of the World's Youngest Boats

With a non-demoninational benediction and a sprig of greenery in the bow, the better to return landward, three new Union Bay skiffs were wetted in Lake Union yesterday. The skiffs, suitable for both sailing and rowing, not to mention fishing, crabbing, eating lunch, sanding and painting, are part of The Center for Wooden Boats family boatbuilding program. They were built in four days.

The Last Wet Paint Sign for Some Time

When doesn't this boat have wet paint? The Mistral deck got a coat of quicky non-skid, lest the crack crew go flying just when things got fun, leaning and wet. There are rumors of some varnishing and the engine is still something to keep one up at night, but it looks like Mistral's maintenance is about done for a while. This means we're getting into a sweet spot of sailing. Duck Dodge Tuesday. Possible Lake Washington sail Saturday to a) try to break the engine/see if it will make it to Port Townsend and b) tune up for racing in Port Townsend.

Winner of the Seaview East Carhartt's Fashion Show

Name the wearer and win a prize.

Lighting the way around the Sound

Here's Dave Frazeur, a charming Coast Guard auxiliary and retired sailor who's CV includes the Trans-Pac race. He played host one recent morning to a tour I did of the lighthouses around Puget Sound, featured last week in the Seattle Times. Dave is standing by the Fresnel lens of the lighthouse at Fort Worden near Port Townsend.

Home At Last

Here's a couple pictures of the newly minted Mistral. After a week on the hard, we splashed the boat and did a whirl of work to get her safely down the ship canal to The Center for Wooden Boats.
Highlights:
-- The bilge quickly filled with water and the pump didn't work. I had to prime the pump a few times by putting it in a bucket of water up high. How do you spell relief? G-u-r-g-l-e, as in the gurgle of a pumping bilge pump.
-- The propeller shaft got hot after only 100 yards and a paste came out of the stuffing box. Erik Nielsen and I tied to a pier and I started getting ready to overhaul it on the fly but then realized it was dripping water, a sign that it just needed to get a little wet to stay cool.
-- The Center had hardly any dock space so we risked losing new, soft paint to a couple chafing fenders. Greg Reed, dockmeister and soon-to-be Mistral haberdasher, cleared the way for the lovely and paint-protecting arrangement above.
Thanks to Erik Nielsen for piping up to help this morning and putting up with the nervous and recalcitrant skipper. Thanks too to the Seaview East Boat Yard. Ditto to Dave Erskine, Mistral mechanic extraordinaire, who tweaked the idle when we got back and hopefully solved our fouling plugs problem.
It's clear sailing, with some semi-gloss polyurethane thrown in for looks, from here on in. Duck Dodge Tuesday night

 

At last, the last thing to be painted

That would be a freshly painted boot stripe, the last major task of this week's haulout. We splash at 11 a.m. tomorrow and sail in the Duck Dodge Tuesday.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a Blanchard

Mistral was hauled out in good company. Sharing the hard at the Seaview East boat yard were two Blanchard Junior Knockabouts. The one above is getting a final stroke of bottom paint before being splashed and towed back to The Center for Wooden Boats. Heron Scott, the boots to the left, reports the two boats were rented the moment they hit the dock.

Wanted: One Sign Painter

A new coat of topsides paint has Mistral shining like a new dime but the ever-lovely transom had to be left alone until we found a sign painter who could recreate that gold lettering. Painters willing to work at non-profit rates should feel free to contact us with a note in the comment box.

Blonde, Ale

Theory: Given a choice between free gifts and free beer, people will go for free beer.
Brooke Marjamaa, Mistral race personnel manager and chief of festival logistics, was just one of a bunch of people who turned out for the boat's first-in-an-occasional beer-inspired work parties. That would be bottom paint she is so eagerly sampling with a chip brush. The day's summary is impressive: topside painted, bottom painted, most of the tape removed, two Pagliacci pizzas consumed. All that's left is a boot stripe, probably tomorrow, and a splash, probably Monday. The boat really looks magnificent. If we had Lay-Z-Boys, we would have sat and stared at Mistral as if she were a TV. Instead, we stood and stared.

Free Beer!

That's Heron Scott tearing into the mysterious bow leak that last year had a small river running down the Mistral sole when seriously underway. Not long after this picture was taken we unearthed a sizeable gap in the stem and fair amount of wet caulking, all since repaired.
Oh yeah, the free beer. The Experience Mistral Project's promotions department was so smitten by the success of the Free Gifts! promotion that it is sponsoring a Free Beer! night at the Seaview East haulout site tomorrow, Thursday. (A map will open when you click the Seaview East link.) This will take place when most people are knocking off work for the day. Mistral activities will likely continue apace, so wear clothes that will only be improved with bottom paint.
Also on tomorrow's docket: a bit of sanding and a touch of priming, a visit to Fisheries, taping and painting the topsides with semi-gloss white enamel, buying beer and ice, ordering pizza, then slathering bottom paint wherever that's supposed to go.

Three Danes and a Baby

And a new low for Mistral headlines.
Drawn by the Scandinavian black hole that is Ballard, the entire three-person work crew for Mistral Tuesday was made up of Eric/ks of Danish descent. Pictured, from left: Erik Nielsen and Eric Nissen. Eric Sorensen is behind the camera.

Free Gifts!

A longish entry ensues. Cut to the penultimate paragraph should you want to make haste to the chase.
The promotions staff in the Experience Mistral Project's marketing department has been pushing to "incentivize" (their term) the Mistral volunteer effort but have faced resistence from the Department of Cultural Standards, a backroom committee that aims to preserve the Mistral ethos of volunteerism and non-commercial camaraderie. As the DCS argument goes, incentivizing the volunteer effort would compromise the integrity of the program and lead to complaints of "selling out" (their term).
Promotions countered that incentives would be a sign of the Project maturing, and we would see this when we heard complaints like this: "Mistral is just not the same now that you can't scrape and varnish all winter and not even go sailing."
The promotions argument has carried the day in this evening's marathon meeting of the Executive Committee, which is all so much bureaucratic hoopla save for one thing -- the advent of free Mistral stuff!
The top volunteers in this week's haulout extravaganza, judged by hours spent and general attitude, will receive cool Mistral crap not unlike the maritime geegaws garnishing the dash of the Mistral support vehicle, pictured above. Stay tuned for word on the upcoming Mistral t-shirt promotion!
Meanwhile, the haulout continues. Today saw sanding of the topsides and priming of the patched spots. Tomorrow will be an all-hands effort of prepping the bottom for speed and hard bottom paint. Topside painting is also possible. The skipper will be there early, like, 8 a.m., and will offer lots of leadership in anything needed until 2 p.m., when he has to drive his daughter to soccer.

 

On the Hard, Haulout Day, Part Two

Mistral came out of the water without incident and only a couple surprises -- a huge gouge below the starboard waterline and a seven-sixteenths inch gap in the stem right at the waterline. The gouge came while Center for Wooden Boat staffers were moving some docks. The gap in the stem is the likely cause of a gush of water that liked to run down the sole whenever the boat got a serious bow wave going. We've sanded and filled the gash. Heron has judiciously filled the bow gap and corked the damp seams around it. We've also faired and filled lots of other dings and chips.
Remaining tasks:
-- Tuesday: sand the filled spots and prime. Sand the rest of the hull. Sweetnail(v.?) holes in the stem for a bronze band we're replacing.
-- Wednesday: paint the topsides.
-- Thursday: bottom paint.
Random tasks for volunteers who don't have sandpaper or paint brushes: replace the prop zinc, repack the stuffing box.
Win a lunch with the Mistral skipper! This for the crew who cleans and oils the bilge.
Contribute to the Mistral endowment! We need a few hundred dollars for hard bottom paint, which can be sanded to make the boat more competitive. Otherwise we use the surplus soft bottom paint kept at the Center. This boat needs your contributions to go fast.

Haulout -- Day One

In spite of a rough-running engine, the S/V Mistral cleared a gauntlet of two bridge openings yesterday and moored at the Seaview East boatyard. The craft gets hauled out today at 9 a.m., followed by all sorts of madcap hilarity -- power washing, fairing of the hull, possible bottom paint. Feel free to drop in and lend a hand. Click the link for the address. For more info, call 206-799-9186.

A Big Week

Mistral will probably go out this afternoon as the wind is expected to come out of the north. Likely sail times are 2 and 3. This will be the start of a busy week as at the end of the day we will motor over to Ballard for a haulout. Crew are welcome on all outings.