A Maiden Voyage

I first want to take a moment to honor a father, a husband, and a friend.  Shortly after our boat touched the sea for her first time, Barney, Chris’s father, passed away.  However, he was able to receive word that our boat worked and a dream came true.  He was as much a part of it as we were.  Barney really enjoyed seeing the entire boat come together.  At first, it was a sketch on a piece of paper which grew over time into what you see today.  He constantly provided his wisdom in the build out and not to mention the copious amounts of coffee he brewed for us that kept us warm and spirits high.  His inspiration and love helped create something incredibly unique.  We dedicate her creation and maiden voyage to him.

Chris Moore wrote the following about the passing of his father.

“I would like to dedicate the maiden voyage of Apocalypso in loving memory of my father Barney J. Moore who passed away this week from a heart attack at the age of sixty years.  He is survived by his loving wife Sabrena; four sons Jeff, Sean, Patrick, Chris and five beautiful grandchildren.  My father was a loving man and one of the finest businessmen I have ever known.  When I was growing up he was active in our community of Venice, Florida, serving as president of various professional and charitable organizations in Sarasota County including the Sirtoma Club, Big Brothers & Big Sisters, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Board of Realtors.  Dad, we will miss you so much.”

BELOW IS A SHORT COMPILATION VIDEO OF APOCALYPSO FROM THE BEGINNING TO HER MAIDEN VOYAGE.  THE IMAGE WILL TAKE YOU TO MEGAVIDEO

CLICK ON IMAGE TO LINK TO MEGAVIDEO

A couple things happened in Miami that I will touch on.  We had planned on embarking on our journey around Florida but we had a few things working against us.  For one, it’s freezing cold in South Florida.  One night it got down to 42 degrees in Miami, way too cold to be sleeping on an open boat.  Second, the boat needs further attention before she embarks on such a long journey.  Further repairs and ideas will come in a later post but essentially we need a second centerboard, better rope, a small 4hp motor, better shelter, replace zinc screws, and rearrange the cockpit for easier steering.  Like I said we will discuss all of these issues in detail in a future post and possibly seek further advice from the friendly boat community around the world.  We are flattered that so many have been tracking our progress.  Thankyou.  We embark in 2011 for Florida, this time when it’ll be warmer and fo real.

Shovin Off

Into the wind she goes!!!

whats up duder!

Ha, they thought we were cubans on our boat!

MORE TO COME SOON

Update

Wow, a lot has happened in the last few days but we are a bit too tired for it now.  Soon, we will update the site with the latest photo’s and video’s of our vessel in action!

Miami Here We Come!!

Loaded up the trailer, solid.  12 Hours to Miami via I 26 to I 95.  We are being rocked by yet another snow storm, YAAAAARRRRGGG!!!!  This will be the last snow to every touch Apocalypso again.  Our next post will be from some island library in the Keys.

Done

Sleeping Arrangements

We discussed exactly what kind of accommodations we should have on the boat and ultimately came up with two tarps pieced together.  We were going to use two tents, one on each platform but this just did not pan out like we expected.  It was too complicated and we could not use our stoves in foul weather.  Once we set our anchor we will roll up the boom and sail then install a single line across from the rear mast to the front mast.  Our tarps are connected to 9” bamboo and rolled out.  This gives us some standing room and is pretty easy to put up in foul weather.

We are a bit concerned about heavy rain.  Since it is in a lean two fashion we cannot prevent rain from coming in sideways.  We thought about installing two triangle tarp sections to the ends so we would be completely enclosed and dry.  Tomorrow we may see if that will work.  Nonetheless, we feel pretty confident that this will suffice as our shelter.

check it!

we got some funky colors going on!

Cost Data

We updated our cost data to what it actually cost us.  Turns out the boat only cost us about $800.00, pretty reasonable in my opinion considering used sailboats go for a couple grand, not including how much it would take to fix it up.  The best part is that anyone who knows how to screw in a bolt, tie a couple knots, and can use power tools can build this boat.  All the parts can be acquired at local hardware stores and internet sites, excluding the aluminum pontoon, which is strangely indicative to only the southeastern portion of the United States.  Nevertheless, we believe we have discovered an ingenious way to build strong, efficient, and cost effective sailing vessels using the materials in our region.

http://apacolypso.wordpress.com/cost-data/

Ahoy Apocalypso!

Proafile is a website that we have both looked at countless times.  We are very flattered that they would publish an article about our attempts at building a sailing canoe.  They really picked up on our desire to use regional materials and simplicity as keystones for our design.  You can view the article at www.Proafile.com

Our next project is in fact a proa!

Finally finished the rigging!!!  We put up the yard and boom, installed the blocks, sail, and ran the halyard and main sheet lines.  It’s only an 85 sq ft sail but she will be just enough to cruise.  We also installed our barrel mounts.  While underway, these 55 gal blue barrels will ride up out of the water while at night they will sit in the water to offer stability since we designed the boat so that only ONE outrigger is in the water.  Additionally, we installed our pannier bags to the front and back.  These bags are used for bicycle touring and are 100% waterproof, perfect for our application.  We later installed the cooler, fishing rod mount, a 5 gallon poo bucket (duty calls all the time), a sherpa backpack, and installed the second outrigger.

We still have a few other things to do, busy work, but for the most part here she is.  We depart Feb 12th out of Biscayne Bay in Miami.

CLICK PICTURE TO “ENHANCE” ; THESE ARE LARGE PHOTOS!

Here she is!! It is designed for one person to be in the front (paddle seat) and one in the back steering it with her beautiful 10.5 black locust viking oar. Looks strange though with all the snow

How the yard meets the boom. It sits in a nice little dug out and anchored. Our rigging cost less than 100 bucks, outstanding, thankyou mother Earth

Our rod holder, gotta catch some fish

side view, see our dingy

Pannier bags, many many uses. We will hold our NOAA charts and navigational tools up here as well as other things

Halyard, how the yard connects to the mast

at the bottom you can see our cam cleat and fiddle block. This is how we will control the mainsheet while underway

Front angle is cool, she looks tribal

Main sheet block

Done

Stub Mast and Swivel Cam Cleat

Pretty productive day, installed the stub mast and paddle chair.  A swivel cam cleat was also installed.  This little device runs the main sheet line from the boom to the cam cleat and to the sailors hand.  This is how you control the tension of the sail.  We also laid out the yard and boom ready to install the sail on.  Tomorrow we will connect the sail, yard, and boom to the stub mast, set up rigging, etc.  We also finished installing our water containers, cleats, saddle bags, and decided to reinforce the centerboard mount.

The centerboard mount consists of 3 sets of boards bolted together with the centerboard which all connects to the pontoon flanges.  Connected to the flanges is the tool box.  We thought that all of it together would create enough tension to successfully withstand all the forces the centerboard may encounter.  So we decided to thus reinforce the inside of the tool box so instead of the force being concentrated on the thin aluminum tool box bottom it is concentrated on a 2”x4”x2′ strut bolted to the bottom of the tool box, solid.

We are close to being done, were in the home stretch!

How the steering oar fits on, tribal

snow

measuring the lashing holes for the stub mast

yard and mast together, yarg she blows!

all together

the swivel cam cleat w/ fiddle block annnnd a miller high life. This is one of the most important pieces on the boat. New, this device runs over 100 bucks, we acquired this one for 20 by a random ebay listing, fate if you will

The infamous water bottle carriage. We should be able to hold up to 10 gallons of water, and maybe a gallon of rum too!

It got too cold today for this but tomorrow she will meet the vessel in which she will pull her captains to the glorious ends of the earth, or to Key West at least

DEPARTURE!

We are just about ready to set sail.  We are shooting for Friday FEB 12 out of a Miami harbor.  There we will have a shakedown of the boat for a day or so and then head down to the keys!

CLICK PHOTO FOR DEPARTURE LOCATION

Just About Done

We are at about 95% done.  All that is left is the rigging.  Unfortunately, the south is about to get slammed again by winter weather.  They are calling for >10” of snow so that will put a halt on everything.  Once the snow passes we will lay out our mast and boom, set the sail, and then attach it all to the boat.  We should be in the water in less than 2 weeks!

This little guy is called a boom jaw. It sits in side the bamboo boom and attaches to the mast.

This is a neat trick to hold our water on board. A main line will run from the Iako mmount to the deckboards. Attached to the rope is the caribiner then braided sissel attaching to our water jugs, 4 on each side. We will have a capacity to carry up to 8 gallons of water, saddle bag style

Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes by Gary Dierking helped us with lots of the plans. Dierking is an expert in building sailing canoes.

Mast and boom complete. We wrapped and siliconed the ends.

The mount for the stub mast and mast. The stubmast will slide in on the peg and then lashed to the paddle seat. The main mast will zip tie to the stubmast and pivot on the saddle

Bored hole in the centerboard, ready to be mounted to the hull

bolt and mount for the centerboard.

The oar lock in the spreader. Our steering oar will fit here and pivot. There are two spreaders

Almost ready. After the storm blows over we will mount the rigging and get ready to transport it down.

Snow and Paint

oh yeah

It’s a bad omen to not name your boat so on Jan 25th I broke out some paint brushes and gave her a name, Apocalypso.  I roughly drew out the lettering and it’s location (Asheville, NC) and went to work.  At first, it had dark shades of black, red, and orange but ultimately decided to brighten it up, happy trees…  A few streaks of blue, dot work, and 2 hours later this is what I came up with.  A funky retro 1960ish VW hippy paint job, fitting for a boat born in Asheville I would say.  We’ve been hard at work, forcing ourselves to pound coffee and go out and work, even in the snow.  There was 1/2 inch of snow on her this morning, the first rays of Florida sunshine on our pale skin will quickly remind us why we subjected ourselves to the elements of this bitter mountain winter.  We simply make a list every day of things that need to get done and wait till we crack beers till it’s all done, worked so far.

We jigged, sanded, and varnished our red oak centerboard, looks great!  We slapped a second coat on our viking oar, and sanded down our stub mast, mast, and boom.  We had to use an industrial paint stripper fixed to a battery powered drill to strip off the outer layers of the bamboo.  This was a long, monotonous task which ultimately produced something incredibly beautiful, except I have had bamboo sawdust boogers for two days now, what are ya gonna do?  Upon sanding down our boom we noticed more than 20 insect bores and two enormous cracks down one side, this is not good.  We used 90lb test twine and wrapped the snot out it and then superglued, hopefully stopping further cracking.  Chris has been designing how the two masts will actually fit onto the deck, this will be better explained in the coming post once the pieces are all assembled.

We also created something we both call THE BIBLE.  On Sunday it rained and rained and rained, impossible to go outside and work.  We bought an ink cartridge, some plastic sleeves, and printed out over 100 pages of NOAA nautical charts.  We went from Punta Gorda to Miami and all of the keys, that should keep us busy.  It took a whole day but it will provide us with useful information the entire way.  A regular size NOAA chart cost roughly $26.  We printed out six of these charts which should have cost over $150, all for about $15.

We’ve begun to outfit her with all of our gear.  I cleaned out our tool trunk and began to load her up.  So far we have a coleman 2 burner, one gasoline burner stove, two tents, cook pot, crab steamer, frying pan, utensils, lifevests, vhf radio, rain gear, etc.  Just an idea of what we are taking.  I also rigged up our clothes bags.  I am using two Ortlieb bicycle panniers strung across the hull, saddlebag style.  I also designed a way for us to carry our water.  A main line will be rigged from our iako to the deckboards which will be fitted with a heavy duty caribiner holding 8-10 gallons of water.  We will drink 1 gallon/per person/per day so that gives us roughly 4-5 days without having to go ashore.

Other than that, we are right on schedule.  By the end of this week we should be completely done.  We plan to begin the rigging on Friday and will be sure to update the site the whole way.

snow this morning, yarg...

Second coats! Centerboard to the right

up close

the mast!

Here's an idea of what the mast will look like on the boat