C-025 Bisquit

[Bisquit]

I had a fairly interesting afternoon on our boat a couple of weeks ago. My son and I went out for a sail - beautiful weather, sunny, 15 - 20 knots breeze out of the west so no seas off of Chicago - a great day. On our way back into the harbor the engine died. I have been chasing a nagging air leak in the new diesel installation. I have had an intermittent problem with this since launch. I believe I have it fixed now. No big deal, We'll just sail her back to the can. Some concentration and care are required as the north end of Monroe Harbor is a fairly dense mooring field. Additionally, when the breeze is out of the west it swirls and shifts quite a bit as it channels through the tall office buildings that make up Chicago's skyline. We were coming into the can a little hot so I dropped the main just under a boat length from our mooring figuring we would easily coast right to it. Just then the wind puffed up and shifted right on our bow -- stopping us dead in our tracks. OK -- I'll just scull her the last 15 ft to the can. I started to work the tiller. I had to pump pretty hard because of the breeze -- then the tiller broke at the tiller bracket. This is about the time I remembered the old adage that a disaster is rarely the result of one mishap but rather the culmination of a series of mishaps and bad decisions. I scavenged the tiller from an abandoned boat and did a few repairs before I varnished it up and put it to work on the Gail Grace. I figured it would last the season and I would build one after I had enough time with the boat to know exactly what shape would work best. I figured wrong. I grabbed the bracket and turned the boat letting the wind take us. We were able to grab an empty can a little further down the harbor. There we bled the diesel, got the engine started and limped back to our can before the owners of the mooring we pirated came in from their sail. That night I cut up a straight tiller from an old piece of poplar I had in my basement. Just a temporary fix till I could make a proper tiller.
This weekend I made the proper tiller. First I took some measurements, then I made a few profile templates from 3/16" luan ply. I brought those down to the boat and decided on a profile. Back in the shop I cut some True Mahogany and White Oak strips, made up a form by screwing 2 x 2s to a piece of plywood, then I covered the whole thing with shrink wrap tape. I slathered the strips with epoxy, sandwiched them in a couple of fiberglass battens then clamped them to the jig slowly drawing each clamp a few turns at a time. Yesterday morning I popped the laminate out of the jig, ran it through the table saw, the planer, the router and spent a little time with the sander. I am pretty happy with the result and it should be super strong, give me maximum room in the cockpit and enough leverage to easily steer in heavy weather.