Hope you are all well and enjoying the enforced solitude during this round of the plague. I am back in Galveston for a while…hope to return to finish the rigging job on SWIFT OF IPSWICH sometime in June or July.

Yesterday, Ruth Downes and I stepped the mast on DULCINEA, Flicka 20 sloop, hull number 302, and thus advanced one step closer to sea-trials later this month.  Being a traditional sailor/rigger, I made sure we had coins to place under the mast for good luck and to pay Charon the boatman for passage across the river Styx…. hopefully, we will not require his services anytime soon!  The two coins are a French Polynesian 50 Francs coin I picked up in Tahiti while sailing on the HMAV BOUNTY, and the other is a 100 Drachma coin given to us by our dear friend Maggie Stenquest Fuller – thanks Maggie!  During a hiatus from the SWIFT OF IPSWICH project last winter, I performed a major blister repair job on DULCINEA and renewed the topsides paint, and also completely stripped and painted the mast during the haul-out.  She looks great!

All the standing and running rigging has been renewed. I decided to use New England STS HSR for the standing rigging instead of stainless-steel wire. It has a nice feel against the hand when you are working your way forward and holding on to the shrouds. I could not resist adding an embellishment to the splices in the form of a 5x4 Turks Head knot. I decided to renew the bowsprit shrouds and bobstay on the new bowsprit with galvanized chain. Last weekend I finished dressing the square holes for the carriage bolts on the new 3/16” silicon bronze chainplates and installed them … they look great and really are a bit of boat bling. The original 1/8” thick stainless-steel chainplates had stress riser cracks at several of the bolt holes.  I enjoyed doing some leather work with hand-stitching some pigskin spreader cap leathers to protect against chafing the sails.  If interested in what stitch I used, here is a video I made on the locked Herringbone stitch taught to me by Kit Africa during the 1989 LADY WASHINGTON rigging job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-uXmpoe-Do

I plan on writing an article for the newsletter “Flicka Friends” on the blister repair and another on the rigging restoration, which will go into much more detail on techniques used and the rationale behind them.  I am waiting to get the outboard back from a local Galveston outboard repair shop after a tune-up and repair of throttle linkage, exhaust manifold, and the tilt mechanism. Then all that is left to complete before sea-trials is to bend on sails, reeve off new running rigging, and renew original lifeline stanchions and lifelines.   

DULCINEA, ex KITTIWAKE is a stout well-found little ship of a boat as evidenced in an article written by her previous owner, Hal DeVaney in “Flicka Friends” vol. 16, no. 3.  She will be underway again and I hope to have Hal aboard for a sail this spring or summer.  https://flicka20.com/Content/documents/newsletters/ff_16_3.pdf

Fair leads,
Jamie
www.thesquarerigger.com

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