Deconstruction: Part 1

April 26, 2008.

Yesterday was the first day of real boat work. Jill and I arrived at the boat around 11am. It was a beautiful day and we were glad the yard had not moved her inside. The sun was shining, wind was blowing and the Amtrack trains were coming into town. The yard where the boat is kept rests along a canal, and the only thing separating the yard from the water are two parallel steel tracks. This made for a rather noisy morning.

We unload some tools from the car and dove right into to taking 6997 apart. Jill spent some time taking the rub rails off, doing her best to keep them in one piece. I got to work on taking the interior seating, floor boards and ghetto patch jobs off the boat. Before, I started this little project I needed to pull all of the sails, rigging and junk out of the boat.

Here is the list of what came with the boat.

1 Cedar T- Boom
1 Wooden Spinnaker Pole in working condition
3 Spinnakers (1 solid black(no SN, 1 red and white (SN 9515), and 1 blue, grey and white(no SN))
1 Jib
1 Oar
1 Rotten cockpit cover
1 Full Mast-up Deck Cover
1 Mainsail (SN 6997)
1 Mainsail (SN 2555)



This was basically organized by throwing it on the boat trailer next to ours.

Now that I had something to work with I got started. I want to point out that this boat is incredibly well built. I was amazed at some of the joining work, the quality of the woods used and the complexity of the centerboard configuration. The boat is just beautiful. Yes, currently a red-headed step child, but beautiful nonetheless.

I started pulling screws and didn't stop for about an hour. When I was done, we were left with a bare interior. Jill and I spent around an hour removing all of the hardware from the deck. It is nice to have little person like her to crawl around under the deck while I turn the screwdriver.

During the day we probably had around 15 people come up and talk to us about the boat. Most would have these enormous smiles on their faces and some would shake their heads. We had a few from the Teddy Roosevelt days telling us about how the Lightning was the first boat they sailed, some so far in age that they could have been on their third marriage by the time this boat saw water for the first time.

I popped a couple of beers, hoping it would help nurse the hang-over from the night before. It did. Miller High Life is a great brew, and with their current marketing push, seemed fitting for this type of a project. Wendall would be proud.

Jill began the necessary process of vacuuming the water, leaves, twigs, sticks, pine cones, scratch off lotto tickets and miscellaneous muck out of the boat while I moved on to the deck challenge. This was by far the most difficult part of deconstruction.

The deck is all plywood that is covered with painted canvas. It is stretched out and then stapled to the hull/deck seam. What a pain in the ass. The staples were 3/4 inch stainless prong tacks and were only a 1/4 inch apart. Like I said, a pain in the ass. The bad news was that I had to pull these staples out. The good news is that I had to pull the staples out. If the deck were rotted they would have fallen out like a pair of loose dentures. I did my best to try to keep the staples attached to the canvas as I went down the edges to save myself time picking them up off the ground. I was able to attack the transom, and port/starboard sides all the way up the splash guard.



I felt like this was good days worth of work. We packed up everything that we removed from the boat. I am planning on working on the interior at home. Today I washed and dried the spinnakers. I need to wait for a sunny warm day to get the mainsail and jib cleaned up.

There are some really cool hardware pieces that we pulled off the boat. I hope you enjoy the blog.