Water Tight Doors

Installed some watertight doors this week for the engine room and bulkhead #9. The space forward of #9 will be our "garage" for general storage and will also have a heavy watertight hatch leading to the anchor deck at the bow of the boat. This will give us a safe way to get up on the bow in heavy weather and also serve as a forward emergency exit from the main cabin. I also imagine that  Sam will try to use 

this, in the future, as an alternate entry and exit from his cabin (which will be directly aft of #9) when he doesn't want to alert us to his comings and goings from the boat. He can be pretty stealthy sometimes...

Much time was spent, in the last week or so, doing final production welding between the hull plate and the frames and longitudinals. This work doesn't show up well in the pictures and is not as dramatic as tacking up new steel, but is really the important part of the job to get right. Its what finalizes the build and makes the boat strong and whole. Again, the weld work is coming out very good and this should be one helluva tough boat.

Sam and I did a little more shop work too, bolting accesories to the engine and designing some of the engine plumbing that we'll be fabricating soon. Next week, I'll be working on fabricating fuel system manifolds (just waiting on an order of ball valves and a few more misc bits of plumbing. Also starting to look for sources for the stainless steel parts that we will need for the fairleads and bitts on deck, as well as the louvers that we will be fabricating for the engine room ventilation supply and discharge openings.

Tomorrow, we are forecast to have a very unusual (early) storm system blow through. Forecast is for high winds and heavy rains for the next 48 hours, so looks like our boat will be getting wet a little ahead of schedule. With the completion of the bottom plating, the boat is braced well against the wind, and with the side shell plating not in place, there will not be much for the wind to push on. That said, we will certainly be keeping an eye on things at the site for the next day or two...