The whole Hog


It is disappointing, that with every step of discovery, getting the boat on the water and sailing, advances further into the future. This creates a push/pull tension where I want to maintain the craftsmanship of wooden boat building technique and keep the integrity of the wayfarer, but I am also impatient to go sailing.

This was further reiterated by accepting the inevitable, that this project has escalated into a total rebuild. The final straw came when I realised that a major component was missing from the hull. The Hog ( inner keel ) was cut off 100 mm aft of the centreboard case and was removed from there, aft to the transom. - Probably due to the earlier state of damage.

Up until now this little omission has been ignored due to the fact that I knew what it meant, and I hoped that it could be resolved in some way without rebuilding the entire hull, re-planking , removing outer keel, centreboard case etc.

The missing part of the Hog can be seen, cut off aft of the centreboard case.

In  this earlier picture, before the side decks were removed, the repair to the bottom panel and the missing inner keel the can be clearly seen

A solution was considered by laminating and somehow bracing a inner keel in place from the centreboard case aft and this may have worked if I had not looked under the hull, only to find that from the centreboard case aft, the hull had hogged, - drooping down by the stern.

Not obvious to see, however any sort of downward pressure on the top of the transom made it worse.

One thing I do know is, that in all wooden boats, the centre line timbers are very important and the inner keel foremost, as all the frames, floors and bottom planking hangs on that timber. 

The only way to replace the hog is to rebuild the hull completely going back to the the first steps of setting up the framing and placing a new  inner keel.

Acceptance is halfway to happiness !

The Wayfarer is such a special sailing boat that I owe it to Ian Proctor who designed such a superb master piece and all the old skilled wooden boat craftsman of the past, to preserve this boat as it was originally built.

In this age of instant gratification it would be easy to just fix it up and go, yes, I will lose out on the cost to benefit ratios etc, however as a craftsman I cannot live with the thought that I could have done it the right way and better.