Category Archives: Rebuilding Boats

18 degrees of freedom, Four nailed down

I’m not sure I’m counting right when I say 18 degrees of freedom. Really counting it and figuring out which ones are independent of each other would probably give me a headache. Either that or make a good problem for a college mechanical engineering class, which I’m not qualified to teach.

I’ve got an arch to build. I’ve built two legs and a curved top. I want to attach it to Flutterby so that it is properly aligned with the back of my hard dodger to support three big solar panels. I had built all three pieces by the time I left this boatyard last summer. I had started trying to figure out how to fit them together then, but left before I finished.

When I returned, I was dreading this complicated set of decisions, so I decided to make easier progress on the hard dodger, as all the complicated decisions like this were already made. having done some good work there, I’m back at it again.

The saying goes “measure twice, cut once.” If you know how long a piece you want, you only have one measurement. Double-check it and then cut it! That isn’t my problem.

I put the three parts temporarily over the cockpit, about where they will go. Then I started measuring. Two measurements doesn’t even get me started. I’ve got two plumb bobs to check if each leg is at the same angle fore-and-aft. and also inboard/outboard. I’ve got two more to check the height and position of the arch. I’ve got marks where the outside edges of the solar panels will go on both the arch and the back of the dodger. I’ve got rails balanced between the two of them so I can check both that the arch and the back of the dodger are parallel, and that the solar panel edges are at a right angle to both arches. I can check the angle of the dodger, the arch, and the connecting rails with a level. To tweak things right, I’ve got six strings tied to the legs and tugging them in various opposing directions.

Last week, I did something big. I decided to drill four holes. The day before yesterday, I actually drilled two holes in the base of each leg. Doing it took a bit of creative work with a drill press, and it was while an amazing front was blowing through, complete with a tornado warning on my phone and the lights flickering a couple times.

Yesterday I did the next step. Put everything back up together, and drilled two holes into the boat, and put in screws. Boom. Now the bottom of each leg is located in two dimensions. Four degrees of freedom nailed down. 14 to go (plus or minus a few!)

Deciding how to decide can be the toughest part.

The actual decision is easier, but can be tedious. You have been warned. If your eyes glaze over a couple sentences into the next paragraph, just give up and skip to the last paragraph!

Today I went back and re-measured a couple things. Discovered that two measurements didn’t agree with each other. The two rails that should be parallel weren’t perpendicular to the same thing. Scratched my head a bit. Re-measured and found out that the marks where I was locating the outside rails were not the same distance apart on the arch that they were on the dodger. Oops. Fixed that. Noticed that my beam is twisted a bit, with one corner up about a half inch compared to the other. Found that I could clamp it flat without too much effort, and figured I’d do that when I glued it all together. Noticed that while the wheel is vertical, and that the stainless pipe on the front of the binnacle is NOT vertical. Now i know which one to look at when I’m checking the legs.

And I decided that I don’t care if the legs are exactly vertical or not. My masts aren’t at the same angle either, and the boat doesn’t float upside down from that. I still need to set that angle, and I’ve decided I’ll do it based on where it puts the front of the solar panels with respect to the front of the dodger instead. It matters more to me, and it is easier to measure. Double-win!

Another decision. In the morning I’ll re-check a bunch of measurements, and drill two more holes and put in two more screws. I’ll have the fore-and-aft angle of both legs set. Two more degrees of freedom nailed down. I’m chipping away at it. Pretty soon I’ll be epoxying the whole thing together!

drill-cover-crop

Goodbye, my faithful friend

Goodbye, my faithful friend. You have been with me for over twenty years. Up until last week, you have done everything I asked you gracefully and without any complaint. In the last week, I started asking more of you than you could give, yet you gave it willingly. Today you were grievously injured, but you still did what I needed of you, with nearly the last of of you. Thank you.

Everybody, go ahead and laugh for a moment at me. I am talking about an electric drill. Have your laugh, and allow me to continue. You may stop reading If you cannot imagine loving a tool; this story isn’t for you. It is for my tool-using friends, who can understand.

My Black & Decker Corded Drill
My Black & Decker Corded Drill

This Black & Decker corded drill came into my life back when I was in my third apartment. I think we bought it to drill some holes and stabilize some shelves in the closet. Up until then, if I needed to do a project, I had gone to home and used my dad’s shop and his tools. It must have been 1991 or 1992. Back then, it was just a drill. Cordless drills were so rare that you didn’t have to say “corded.”

You served me more during my years of home ownership. I cannot count the tasks I did with you then. Then you served me well as a boat owner. Soon after starting work on Flutterby, I started taking you for granted. I bought a fancy cordless drill, with a keyless chuck, and I used you a lot less often. I still use some. I needed the wire wheel too long for your replacement’s battery. I was trying to keep your replacement pristine, so I used you for stirring paint.

Your chuck key and chuck teeth started to wear. I finally bought you a new chuck key, but it never quite fit your worn teeth.. Still you did what was needed. Your cord started to fray a bit. I used a lot of tape and stuff, and kept electricity going safely into you. A few years back, Margaret questioned whether we needed you anymore with your cordless replacement. She was right that there isn’t room for a lot of tools here on Flutterby. But I knew you were still faithful, and I still used you for long jobs, and dirty jobs. So we stayed together.

Three days ago, I asked you to do a hard job. Your cordless replacement ran through his battery too fast for this one. I was cutting out windows for the hard dodger. Four windows to go. Twenty corners of those windows. Each one cut out with a hole saw. Through 3/4” of plywood, with fiberglass on each side. I even filed some sharpness back onto the teeth of the hole saw so it wasn’t quite as dull before starting the job. That didn’t last. As you were cutting these holes, I felt you hesitating. I felt your motor getting tired if I pushed too hard. And with such dull teeth, I had to push hard. You made it through that. It was a glorious day of work on my hard dodger. Then after cutting all those holes, I asked put the sanding drum in your chuck and asked you to clean up rough cuts and touch up the corners. I even used you for sanding flat areas. The new belt sander’s motor had already died. You gave me all this willingly at great cost. It was a glorious day of accomplishment for me.

Today I asked you to shape some fiberglass with a coarse sanding drum. I had just filled in the corner between the original ‘whiskers’ on deck and my new hard dodger. I pulled your trigger, locked it in place, and started grinding away. When your body was uncomfortably hot to hold through cotton gloves, I knew something was wrong. I noticed the burned look around your motor vents. I noticed you were not running smoothly. I was mostly done with the job on one side. I sat down for a break. I started shopping for a replacement for you, doubting you would even finish this job.

I wasn’t able to go shopping just yet, so I went back to work. Did other parts with other grinding tools. And when you had cooled down, went back and ground out the other side, hearing your protests that you didn’t have much left in you. Again I had to let you rest, to cool down, so I worked with other tools for a while. At the end of this job, I asked you for a little more fine tuning with the sanding drum. You didn’t let me down.

I know you aren’t healthy or strong anymore. If I ask you one more job, I know you will give me all you have. I won’t be surprised if you have enough.

My window on the world

Faired Hard Dodger
Flutterby’s hard dodger, after filling and fairing, with very rough oversized holes where the windows will be soon.

I’ve been building Flutterby’s hard dodger. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, which is important….but  the pictures don’t look impressive. Filling and fairing  is at least visible, but still not impressive looking: Apply maybe a pound of stuff where you think there are low spots, cracks, or pinholes. Wait for it to cure. Start sanding, and make about a pound of dust. The result is smoother, with an err…interesting? blotchy? mix of colors. The real results will show up after painting..

When the job is done, much of the world around Flutterby will be seen through these windows, from the cockpit looking forward, or just sticking my head out the companionway like a prairie dog. Cutting the hole is a big step. They are hard to relocate if miss-placed. Putting a rounded inside corner where it is supposed to be is complicated too. Today I made a jig to align the center point for a hole saw exactly where it should be next to two edges, knowing that none of the corners are 90 degrees, and none are the same either….and allowing just enough extra to clean it up with a sanding drum that is 1/8″ bigger than the hole left by the hole saw. I’ve already made little tools to trace a line the right distance up off the deck, following all the curves. Today, after all the thinking and planning, I was ready and cut a window out and sanded the hole smooth!

One down. Four more to go. The “figuring it out” part was bigger than the cutting part, and that is already done for all five windows. My window on the world is opening up and getting a lot more refined!

The front port window cut out from the outside
The front port window cut out from the outside
The front port window cut out, from the outside
The front port window cut out, from the outside

Learning Curves

“OK, I admit it,” said Barry, one morning. “I’m loving the hell out of this.”

Barry with the dodger under construction
Barry peeks out around the dodger in a moment of whimsy.

I was so shocked by his statement, I would have fallen out of bed had that been possible. Fortunately, it’s not possible to fall out of the v-berth aboard Flutterby.

We were discussing his progress on our winter project, building a hard dodger and arch on which to mount our solar panels. Unlike most boat projects, it was not taking twice as long as he expected. It was taking Barry ten times as long as he expected, and when he made the statement in the v-berth, in early March, I saw no end in sight.

I was not enjoying the hell out of it. Five months of freezing my butt off, in a boat on land, with no car, six miles from the dying town of St. Marys, Georgia, had a completely different effect on me. I had slowly sunk into the depths of despair.

I asked Barry to explain to me what it was that he was loving so much, when all I saw was head-scratching, frustration, and outright failure. “Learning curves,” he said.

I laughed at his unintentional double entendre. The reason the dodger has taken ten times longer than expected is because instead of building a simple, squared-off shape out of marine plywood, we decided we wanted it curved, to match the shape of Flutterby. Most builders would have used fiberglass, which is what the boat is made of. Barry prefers working with wood, though. He opted to build it out of what he calls “tortured plywood.”

The bending jig for the dodger roof
The bending jig for the dodger roof

Becoming increasingly more animated, he explained how the process of learning how to bend and laminate plywood into complex three-dimensional shapes, how to fit them onto the deck of a boat, how to get maximum strength with the lightest materials, was forcing him to use his brain to learn amazing new things.

While I thought he was sitting at his computer, reading LOLCats and surfing Facebook, he was actually using his time to do high-level research and calculations.

“I was spending way too long doing trigonometry and numerical solutions to figure out bending curves and camber and calculating how much the plywood’s going to spring back after you torture it,” he explained. He went on to tell me what he really meant when he said “learning curves.”

“There’s this initial part of a learning curve where you really suck at it. It’s not very fun,” he told me. “It’s slow as hell, because I’m still learning this shit and I’m cracking plywood when I try to bend it…”

Sides of the dodger
What’s wrong with this picture? (hint: when you cut it in half, you don’t get two symmetrical pieces)

I remember the saddest day, in December. He’d spent weeks designing the sides and figuring out how to build them, and together, we spent a day laminating them together. When the epoxy kicked and he took his jig apart, he was almost in tears. We’d made two port sides and zero starboard sides. When he realized that neither of the port sides fit, I think he really was in tears.

Weeks later, we tried again. That time, the plywood cracked and the two sides ended up asymmetrical. He decided to use them anyway.
It was after he attached the asymmetrical sides to the front that he went bananas with trigonometry, trying to figure out how to build a curved top that looked symmetrical. Perfection was impossible, and he studied it for weeks, trying to figure out a compromise solution. He turned to websites about how to bend wood for ukeleles and guitars for answers.

“I have new respect for people who build musical instruments. If I played them, I could digress and waste years on this.” He admitted that his screen time had not all been productive; he’d spend some of it reading and dreaming about the wonderful woodworking tools he would like to have. He shook his head, saying, “I don’t need to have all those toys now. I just need to get this dodger done.”

“I’ve spent more time on this learning curve than I’ve spent fretting on the fact that the dodger is not quite perfect. I don’t know any way I could have gone about this without learning this stuff … but when I started it, I didn’t realize how much I had to learn.”

Measuring steam-bent plywood
Meps helps bend plywood using boiling water (boots and gloves left over from our 2005 trip to Alaska protected us from the boiling water)

Sun boots

“Do I have to?” I whine and I cry,
As I stand under blue, cloudless sky,
But we’ve boiled every pot,
And the water’s so hot,
That my rain boots must keep my feet dry.

Barry buttonholed me today and asked me to to help him pour many gallons of boiling water over plywood (to bend it). This limerick is a fib — you can see from the photo that I love my rain boots. They’re cute and blue, like something Paddington Bear would wear.

The other photo is for my Washington and Colorado friends. It proves we have potheads here in Georgia, too.

Meps in her blue boots and gloves
Paddington Bear helps bend plywood
Meps with a cooking pot on her head
Meps, a two-quart pothead
feature-stuff-post

Going overboard with stuff

Last month, I tried to donate a bag of stuff to the Salvation Army. When I pulled into the parking lot, one Monday morning, I found the office staff filling a dumpster. Over the weekend, someone had left an entire household’s worth of stuff on their doorstep. Rather than sort it, they just threw it all away. They looked at my tiny bag and said, “Sorry, we’d just put that in the dumpster, too.”

Frog trivet
Froggie trivet aboard Flutterby

I took it back to the boat, which is full of overflowing piles on the settee, pilot berth, centerboard trunk, and chart table. I’m not sure where it is now, maybe on the dinette table, which is buried under a pile of pure, unorganized crap that threatens to fossilize.

It’s not my fault that I have all this stuff. When we bought Flutterby, in 2006, she was completely empty. There wasn’t a single dish, piece of silverware, or tool on board; we carefully selected the trivets and toys and t-shirts and canvas bags and navigation tools we wanted and brought them to the boat.

Over the next seven years, something unexpected happened in our lives. People we knew and loved died.

Our older friends nod their heads knowingly and say, “Get used to it.” But I stomp my foot and say, “No! We are too young for this!”

Meps with one of Stevie's froggie toys
One of Stevie’s froggie toys

The problem is, every person who was close to us leaves behind items we love and have to find room for. Flutterby now has a Froggie trivet and a lot of Froggie toys — those were Stevie’s. Bill Brown left behind canvas bags from the Seattle Women’s Sailing Association that bring back happy memories. My clothing locker is overflowing with giant tie-dyed shirts from Philip’s collection. The chart table has navigation tools from Barry’s uncle Roger.

Don’t even ask about the ashes. They take up room, too.

Yesterday, I said to Barry, “This boat is full of ghosts.” He shook his head, saying, “No. Just memories.” That same day, I found out it could be worse.

Lance, who has been working on a very large Gulfstar sailboat, was gone from the yard when we returned from our Christmas trip. We heard that he’d gone north to attend a friend’s funeral.

Yesterday, Lance stopped by to talk to me and Barry. He’s a fairly quiet, thoughtful man, not someone who talks a lot.

“See that boat, there?” he pointed to a modest-sized sailboat across from his own. “I just inherited it,” he said, with a sigh.

Lance's sailboat
A boat is a lot bigger than a trivet

Lance has owned a lot of boats in his life — this one is his 17th. She’s half the size and complexity of his own boat, and she’s practically ready to go. We talked about how easy it would be to finish a couple of projects, jump on board, and go cruising.

But Lance isn’t ready to give up his boat for his friend’s. That brings me back to my original dilemma. I’m not ready to give up my clothes for Philip’s, or my canvas bags for Bill’s, or my toys for Stevie’s. I just keep cramming more and more stuff into the lockers.

Lance did give me a great idea for storing the ashes, though. He was checking out a boat for sale once, and he noticed that it had a false bulkhead. Lance started poking at it, trying to figure out what was behind it, when the woman who owned it stopped him. “Don’t mess with that! That’s Harry!”

It turned out that her deceased husband came with the boat.

“That was too much for me,” said Lance. “I didn’t buy that boat.”

Bluebird on a tin roof

Dancing in the forklift ballet

The place where we’re hauled out right now, St. Mary’s Boat Services, has a unique way of turning a little boatyard into a big one — they put many of the boats on cradles, so they can be moved easily and packed more densely. They use a forklift and a specialized hydraulic trailer to move the cradles around.

There’s a fellow here named Jeff who happens to be the most amazing forklift operator I’ve ever seen. He can do ballet-like things with the forklift that other boatyards need cranes and other complicated equipment to do. Yesterday, I heard him telling someone that in addition to training and certifying forklift operators for all of southern Michigan, he used to be able to pick up a quarter from the ground and hand it to you — using a forklift. “Not this one, though. The controls are too slow.”

Yesterday, Jeff and his boss, Rocky, needed to move four boats in order to make room for one who was ready to splash today. The first two moves were easy, just towing a couple of folks on cradles to new spots. Flutterby was the third boat in, on jackstands, and right after they picked her up with the Travelift, a van pulled in, delivering two shiny new cradles. There was quite a bit of excitement, because this was the first time Rocky and Jeff hadn’t welded up their own cradles.

As you can see, the first new one works perfectly. Now Flutterby can be scooted around in the forklift ballet, too. At dusk last night, they moved us to our new place, right across from a huge live-oak tree that is full of the cutest little birds on the planet: Bluebirds! It looks like somebody painted their topsides with the same paint Barry used on our bottom.

Flutterby hanging in the travelift
Flutterby in the slings with her new blue bottom paint
Van with trailer and cradles
Two cradles arrived just at the moment when we needed one
Flutterby on a cradle with forklift
Flutterby on the new cradle with the forklift in the foreground. Now she’s easy to move and fits into a smaller space.
Bluebird on a tin roof
These charming little birds are the opposite of Flutterby, with blue topsides and rufous bottoms
Flutterby in front of the Addison Point Bridge, near Cape Canaveral, Florida

Preaching to the Choir

Even though I am thousands of miles away from my boat this summer, she is always on my mind. This week, I’ve been all smiles, because Issue 63 of the Junk Rig Association Magazine just came out, with another article (by yours truly) about Flutterby.

Junk Rig Association logo
See the second panel in the JRA logo? Guess who unwittingly inspired them to do that!

For over 15 years, Barry and I have been members of the Junk Rig Association, an international group of people who are interested in junk rigs. They’ve been following our progress with Flutterby‘s unique rig, and when I wrote about our first test sail, the editor of the newsletter asked to reprint my article.

“Urk!” I choked to Barry. I was a little embarrassed. I’d written that piece in a very exuberant but tongue-in-cheek style, and putting it into an international publication required some major rewriting. I carefully rewrote it, splitting the article into two parts, and submitted it with photos:

Flutterby Gets an ‘A’ on Her Test Sail (PDF)
Look! They’re Taking Our Picture! (PDF)

I am so proud to share these with you! Not because of my writing, but because I was able to share Barry’s accomplishment with the world. He has designed and built his own rig, the only one like it in the world, and it works!

Many members of the JRA are expert sailors who know that the Bermudan rig is not the only option. We’re not nuts or crackpots, just evangelists for something that’s worked for thousands of years. Of course, writing for the JRA Magazine is like preaching to the choir.

Even if you never plan to own a junk-rigged boat, the JRA is a wonderful, encouraging organization that produces a beautiful, inspiring magazine. Check out the JRA website: http://junkrigassociation.org/.

At the end of next week, I’ll be living aboard
Flutterby, currently in Georgia, for the first time in seven months. Ohio, Washington, and California were great, but I’m looking forward to unpacking my suitcase again.

Showing off!

Flutterby’s bound for to go

You’re going to love this! Mepsnbarry.com now has a short video of Flutterby sailing, with a musical soundtrack featuring my friends Michael Greiner and Doeri Welch. I filmed it during our shakedown cruise with the new junk rig in December, 2012, in the Intracoastal Waterway, near Wabasso, Florida. The “Easter Egg” portion came from a 2009 Christmas celebration on the hard, in North Carolina.

Deck of Flutterby under sail, with Meps at the helm

Flutterby gets an ‘A’ on her test sail

On Thursday, the 13th of December, the sky in Brunswick, Georgia was gray and cloudy, threatening rain. The temperature had plummeted, and boaters in the marina hunkered down in their cabins by their heaters. A steady stream of cruisers had left the Brunswick Landing Marina in the prior two weeks, heading south in search of sunshine.

I stopped in the office that morning to give Sherry a heads-up. “If you notice our slip is empty today, we’re not leaving without paying our bill. We’re going out for our first test sail.” She gave me a big encouraging smile and a thumbs-up.

We rooted through our lockers and dressed as if we were going for a winter sail in the Pacific Northwest, putting on layers of thermal underwear, wool socks, fleece jackets, gloves, and those ubiquitous waterproof red jackets and black bibs we call “foulies.”

A warning here for our landlubber friends: If that technical term left you shaking your head in dismay, beware of what’s coming. Even our sloop-rig friends may complain that I’m using too much junk-rig jargon. Since it’s hard to scroll back and forth to footnotes in a web document, I’ll explain the jargon as best I can at the bottom of each paragraph.

We departed the marina on 12-13-12 at 13:01. It took us about a half hour to motor up the East river to the Brunswick river, which is wide and deep. Looking up the river, we could see a couple of huge container ships docked and unloading a half mile away. To the left, under the soaring Sidney Lanier Bridge, the casino boat was docked, but they weren’t moving either. We had the river to ourselves, so we set about hoisting our sails for the very first time.

The wind was gusty, ranging from 10 to 15 knots, and we could see by the water rushing past the navigation buoys that a wicked current was ripping through. I had hoped for a mellow, easy first sail, but that was not to be.

I left the motor running as Barry began to hoist the 500-square-foot split-rigged mainsail (the mainsail is the one in front…split-rigged means our sail extends four feet in front of the mast, but the part around the mast is cut away). Keeping in mind that the main on Flutterby’s original rig was only 350 square feet, I gave him a conservative order to keep two panels reefed (A reef is a way to make the sail smaller when the wind is blowing harder).

Our mainsail has seven panels that work kind of like a window shade. The rig was designed to easily put up to five reefs* in, and with some extra work, can even rig it in a storm with just one-seventh of the sail. However, that afternoon, the word “easily” did not apply, and the process of simply raising sails took over 45 minutes.

Flutterby's mainsail and the Sidney Lanier bridge in the distance
View of the Sidney Lanier Bridge

I was focused on the helm, making sure that we weren’t swept sideways into the massive bridge footing, as Barry started hoisting the main using the 3-part halyard. With our multi-part halyards and sheets, we end up with a lot of extra line piled in the cockpit, but we hardly ever have to use a winch.

That first hoist, though, things went wrong. As the third sail panel started to go up, Barry realized that the yard-hauling parrel* was fouled** by the topping lift***, so the yard couldn’t go up all the way. The lazy jack sail gatherer**** for the jiblets***** didn’t work.
===
*The rope that positions the yard, which is the pole at the top of our sail.
**Fouled=messed up
***Ropes from the top of the mast that hold up the sail bundle so it doesn’t fall on our heads when we are reefed or not sailing. The sail bundle includes the sail fabric and the battens, which are poles that go between each of the panels.
****Contraption of rope and webbing that hangs from the topping lift to keep things tidy.
*****On a split rig, the bits of the sail that are in front of the mast.
==

N.B. I can see that writing this to Barry’s requested technical specifications is going to be a bit of a challenge!

Our rig was designed to be sailed from the cockpit, with all the various control lines running back there. But when things go awry, somebody has to clamber up on deck and straighten it out. Barry spent a lot of time that day clambering up on deck to straighten things out. Still, we did eventually get the mainsail hoisted, and then we turned our attention to the mizzen (the smaller sail that is at the rear of the boat).

We didn’t have any problems hoisting the mizzen, and finally, it was time to turn off the engine and trust that we could maneuver this 33-foot vessel under sail alone.

Blessed quiet.

That special moment, one that all sailors know and appreciate, was followed by high-fives, cheering, and victory-dances (but not on top of the cockpit grate!) by the crew of the s/v Flutterby. For the next 60 minutes, the sound of water rushing past our hull was accented with peals of joyful laughter from yours truly. After five years of waiting for this moment, I was giddy and giggling.

The two of us took turns taking pictures and fighting for the right to steer. It was like we had a beautiful horse, and we both wanted to ride. We were both very curious to know how high she could point, or go upwind, but three knots of current kept sweeping us down the river, so our GPS track didn’t show a lot of progress. Still, we fairly flew when we went downwind, especially when we put the two sails out on opposite sides of the boat. Some junk-rig sailors call that “wing and wong” instead of “wing and wing.”

We didn’t go very fast that day, occasionally seeing boat speeds of five or six knots. We were a little unsure of ourselves, the weather, and the new rig, so we kept it slow with our double-reefs, but the potential was there to go much faster.

The whole time we were sailing, we were near the awe-inspiring bridge. The bridge towers are 485 feet, the clearance is 185 feet, and it’s the longest bridge in Georgia. Hundreds of cars passed by, along with the hardiest joggers and walkers. Did they see us? Did they notice our beautiful red-and-white butterfly sails?

Finally, we decided to call it a day and head back to the marina. Barry started the noisy engine, and I lowered the sails, a process that entails releasing the halyard* while pulling in the sheet**, the adjustable downhauls***, and the yard-hauling parrel. One thing I love is the windvane effect of the junk rig — we don’t have to turn the bow**** of the boat into the wind to raise and lower our sails. Like a weathervane, we can just let them swing freely in the wind as we raise and lower them.
===
*The line that pulls the sail up.
**The line that controls the position of the sail relative to the wind.
***Little fussy bits of rope.
****The pointy end.
===

And then we returned to our slip, triumphant. Flutterby was now a proper junk-rigged sailboat, and we were ready to head south with the other cruisers for the winter.

Pictures of the big event:

Main mast and horizon, showing how much Flutterby is heeled
Is this the way a sailboat is supposed to be?
Deck of Flutterby under sail, with Meps at the helm
Happy Meps at the helm
Barry wearing a Santa Claus hat and steering Flutterby
Rig designer Barry at the helm, with a perfect hat to match his sailing jacket. What a satisfied smile!