After a nap in North Minerva Reef’s calm lagoon, we got to work. S located the piece of 1/8-inch stainless steel plate we had stowed away, and K took the measurements and came up with a plan for bending it into a U to make the socket for our new windvane oar.
He pulled the 44 lb Bruce anchor out of the cockpit locker to use as an anvil (you can never have too many anchors). He thought about burying the anchor in the cockpit with sandbags to hold it steady, but all the sand was about 10 ft under the keel so he decided to perch S on the “anchvil” instead. It didn’t work nearly as satisfactorily as 200 lbs of sand bags, but much less dredging using a snorkel and a stock pot was required.
We dug out all the clamps we could find and secured the plate to the anchor shaft (with a piece of aluminum plate on top to help guide the bend).
Then K started giving the plate the business end of a 4 lb maul. After quite a bit of beating, the plate began to bend. Alas, there was some bloodletting, as K says there always must be.
When the plate started putting up a fight, we applied a little heat….
and “encouraged” it to bend with the clamps and a length of metal tubing. S was happy to pitch in where lesser amounts of brawn and skill would suffice. As ship’s safety officer, she felt compelled to set a good example, and kept her earplugs and goggles on because she could never be quite sure when the boy would set to wailing on the plate with his maul.
By the end of the first day, the curve was taking shape nicely.
K spent another morning worrying the stainless until we finally had the shape we needed.
Next came the oar. The original was a work of oar-ish art in teak and stainless, and the windvane manufacturer warned us the oar must be perfectly symmetrical in order to work. The bar was set. S dug out all our scrap wood and found we had piece of mahogany nearly perfect for the job (courtesy of the Shilshole dumpster). We just needed to add a bit to the thickness at the top with some 1/8” plywood (courtesy of the bottom of the quarterberth locker) in order to get a nice taper along the sides. We cut the basic shapes using a circular saw (huzzah for the last-minute Ebay inverter purchase!).
Out came the epoxy and the clamps.
After the glue dried, K went to work shaping the vertical taper and rounding the leading edge using his great-grandfather’s plane.
The cockpit was soon covered with a thick blanket of shavings, but the oar was taking shape.
Before long he had the right taper along the length…
then he started feathering the trailing edge. This involved putting several “gage cuts” along the trailing edge, which he then shaved off to make the fore-and-aft taper (clever! S thought).
The shavings were up to our ankles by this time, but we had ourselves a fine-looking oar.
K then drilled out bolt holes in the metal plate…
and sealed the wood with a couple coats of epoxy.
He added a few bolts, lock washers, and nylock nuts, and we had ourselves a new windvane oar that looked remarkably like the original.
And it works as well too!
After a look through some of our pics we were able to answer the question of why “it done fell off.” Notice the hole in the oar plate, which should be filled with a bolt….
It all came down to a single bolt that backed out of the threaded plate, and our failure to notice it. We now realize that the windvane had steered hundreds of mile with that bolt hanging on by a thread. Luckily for us, it let go before we’d passed our last chance for an anchorage on this crossing.
So in the end, while her people were feeling amputated by the loss of the windvane oar, Bint al Khamseen took it like a little Arabian filly who threw a shoe on the first turn and just needed a few hours with the blacksmith to set things right.
23°37.90’S 178°55.90’W 21-Oct-10 01:55 UTC
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