Deadrise Archaeology

 24 Jun 22:

We had a full day of cupcake baking and potato salad making scheduled but when I mentioned taking a trip to Tyler's Beach to check the set of the new pram sail on the new spars, Skipper dropped her apron and grabbed her hat. The sail photos will be coming 01 July in Small Boats Magazine, plus we'll post a few more that they didn't use. There's something to be said for a sail rig that fits inside your car...

While at the ramp we checked in on the dwindling deadrise fleet, only two remain. We hope their owners have plans to use them, although both have been in various stages of sinking over the past year. 

A third boat was unceremoniously burned and then drug over the seawall a few months back, then bulldozed. Her pile is dwindling but part of the keel and bow remain, offering a study on how the cross planked deadrise was built.

Part of me wanted to check with the County and see if they'd like me to remove what remains, maybe replace the missing parts, but Skipper says it has hauntedvirus. So we'll watch the rest of it slowly disappear.

Rescue Virginia Deadrise

 29 Dec 21:

Found a nest of Deadrise Workboats in Rescue Virginia. 

Found this photo in the nearby Post Office, from a cold Winter day, ice on Jones Creek. The original Post Office opened in October of 1889.

Chesapeake Deadrise Workboat Tyler's Beach Virginia

 12 Nov 21:

We found some Chesapeake Deadrise Workboats at Tyler's Beach Virginia. Some were in better shape than others. We hope the round stern boat will be repaired, one was not so lucky.

Not so lucky.

Vertical bow staving.

There's still good boat building lumber here, but we are unsure of who owns the pile. 

We got some ideas on construction that we can scale down to the 16 foot catboat we are building. 

Catboat Math 05 Apr 20

05 Apr 20:

There's the plan and then there's actually what happens. We have Chapelle's line drawing for a 17 foot diamond bottom catboat, and we planned to scale that plan down to 16 feet. Let's see that's .941176 smaller. So I did a bunch of measurements and scribbled all over a copy of the plans and headed out to the Carriage House to transfer those numbers onto a lofting on the Carriage House floor. But first I had to correct my highly calibrated blue tape baseline, and mark off 1 foot increments out to 16 feet. Then I used the square to find a perpendicular at each foot mark, took the steel tape to find the Feet-Inches-Eighths point, make a mark and put in a deck screw.

Somewhere along the way I remembered that I wanted to scale the beam of this boat down from 8'6" inside of plank to 8 feet outside of plank. I thought I could just reduce everything by 10 percent but instead discovered I needed to draw a new sheer line, and get those new measurements off of the new line. Fiddled with the fair curve and came up with a sheer that looks okay, pending Skipper's approval.

If Skipper is happy with it then we can pull new measurements off of the lofting at a few points to get the measurements we need for building molds and bulkheads.

Placed the rough keel batten down to start thinking about keel shape.

Log of MARGARET ROSE.