Garvey

The garvey is back. This one was built to Chapelle's drawing in
American Small Sailing Craft
about twenty years ago by John Brady. The seaport staff fixed it up and got it back in the water last year. This year the plan is as using it as part of a summer sailing program.
Today Charlie & I sanded & primed it. Kids from CHAD school had done a lot of the rough sanding yesterday.








I put in a "dutchman" to replace an area of rot on the waterline, we scrubbed the spars & cleaned lines.








The rig on this boat is a yawl rig of two sprit sails. Garveys are workboats; farmers haywagons for the salt marsh, market hunting, freight carrying, produce delivery, shellfishing, tonging, and whatever else.

I have always liked the form of garveys, even as a youngster. I saw them around Barnegat Bay, mostly as powerboats. They have an unusual scow like shape easily constructed of rough lumber, the local lumberyard sort. They lend themselves to plywood construction because of their peculiar slab sides. They have hard chines.

Dutchmans are patches you put in wood to fix a hole, like plugging the dike. This is an area of rot on the garvey, under the waterline. It is right above the bottom planking, whose endgrain is visible.






The small cedar block shows the practice cut I made with the router.




If you look carefully, you can see the same cut reproduced on the garboard of the garvey, which has cleared out all the rot down to clean wood.








Last, I taped off the surrounding space so the epoxy would not make a hard spot on the cedar. Then I made a thickened batch of epoxy and glued in the patch with a screw to clamp it. The grain of the patch should match the grain of the original as much as possible. That way the wood will move the same way.




The next picture is from Friday's batch. I planed off the excess patch, then sanded it. You can't see it at all under the primer.