Masts, spars & oars

Whilst the plans suggested aluminium masts and spars we decided to try and maintain the boat's tradional look by making wooden spars and masts. Weight considerations meant hollow construction but we also wanted a tapered mast too. We decided on the 'birdsmouth' design using interlocking pieces of tapered douglas fir. Calculating the correct dimensions was made easy by using two little pieces of free software from the section on 'shareware for boat design' located on the web page of http://www.carlsondesign.com/ . Rounding the masts seemed to produce enough shavings to keep a pet shop in business for a year!

The spars (yard, sprit booms and boomkin) were made out of solid wood. We decided on rectangular cross section for the main sprit boom just for ease of construction and fixing of cleats.

Everything was finished off again with Deks Olje.

Paul made all four double handed oars (I think I was away at the time - again) and made a beautiful job of them especially with a decorative insert of purple heart into the blades. The picture shows Anne, his wife, putting the finishing touch to them.