The boat I'm building is the Chesapeake Light Craft Skerry, the design of which is derivative of the small working sailboats of the British Isles. You'll have to go to the CLC website if you want to see what a finished Skerry looks like because their images are copyrighted. I liked the elegant look of it and appreciated the fact that it could be rowed as well. Having owned a 15 foot sloop rigged sailboat in the past I really liked the the Skerry's one-sail sprit rig for easy single handed use. So in early April I pulled the trigger and the kit was shipped to our lake house in NW Wisconsin, where I could make use of the garage as a workspace. The kit includes a 4x8' box with all the pre-cut wood components and a 2.2' box with the epoxy kit, fiberglass cloth, copper wire for stitches and other miscellaneous hardware. It's a kit so it's got to be easy, right? Will this be a "Scary Story" or a "Skerry Story"? Stay tuned.

Before I could begin I needed to buy and more importantly learn how to use some wordworking tools. I spent a couple of hours one Saturday morning in the Minneapolis branch of Rockler Woodworking learning the difference between a plywood block plane and planes for general use (the plywood one has a shallower angle of cut). The bottom plane in the photo is a rabbet plane for cutting a narrow groove in wood. I need to cut eight gains in various planks. A gain is a "descending rabbet" or one that goes from no depth on one end to full depth on the other. Both of these planes would have to be "tuned" (smoothing out the bottom surfaces with sandpaper) and the blades would have to properly sharpened before use, all of which took time. Who knew?

This is a wheel marking gauge for scribing a line parallel to an edge, a big help in positioning the seemingly hundreds of holes I had to drill for the wire stitches that held the pieces together until they are glued.

The bottom photo is of the two-part epoxy that can be used to attach fiber glass cloth, as a glue, as a wood filler or as a wood coating, depending on what and how much wood powder or silica is added.