Building the Skoota Coach Launch

 It's been a while - like two years - since I've updated this blog.  My apologies... COVID and life got in the way. With a return to a more normal practice schedule, the launch deserved a coat of paint.  After doing quite a bit of research on painting epoxy, and stumbling onto Andy's excellent youtube channel ¨ Boatworks today ¨ I started ordering product.  Painting was a 4 week affair, mostly due to weather, drying time and what my shoulders would tolerate.  But at the end of the day, I'm very pleased with the result!  BTW, the _goal_ was serviceable paint that would stand up to daily launch/retrieves by a bunch of teenagers, getting banged into, and passing the '30 foot test' (looking pretty good at 30 feet).  Bare glass - sanded, but definitely not smooth. Stern view of the same.  10x10 canopies over the hulls, set up in the driveway.  My sainted wife kinda tolerated it.  Starting to lay down Totalboat Totalfair to smooth the hull....

Not sure who else could've done it.  I got to the shop this evening, and found the strongback gone, and the hull sitting in a new cradle.  Must've been elves.  Port hull off the strongback I couldn't resist temptation and pulled the hull out of the workspace into the main shop, pulled the starboard hull out of its hidey hole, got some help with the deck, and viola!  It's a boat!  And everything fits (or close).   I've been trying to visualize the actual size - it's a lot bigger than I thought, and I'm quite pleased.  A lot of work yet to be done, but I'm pretty chuffed with where it's at today! Thanks, elves!!!

Progress Just because there's lots of dead air doesn't mean we stopped work!  A couple of key 'learnings' Once the competition season begins, it's a lot harder for a coach to spend several hours a day working on the boat. It's damn near impossible to take pictures and work with epoxy at the same time And when you work with epoxy, most of the 'work in progress' is hidden from view anyway. Putting the second hull together goes much faster than the first. So here we go... Port Hull We put the last panel on the port hull this morning.   As noted above, it did go significantly faster this time around. Panel screw clamped in place We learned a lot of tricks the first time around, and by measuring/adjusting our work from the starboard hull, we cut 2 months off the second hull's build! We also had several of our team athletes volunteer to help with assembly.  It was great to get them involved, and saved us a much longer night (or 2nd...

Note:  This build began with assistance from Richard Woods (https://sailingcatamarans.com ), who allowed us to acquire the plans and adapt his Skoota design to fit our build requirements.  We are feeding back our build to Richard for possible inclusion in a more formal offering of the Skoota "16".  Any inquiries about plans, costs, etc. should be directed to him, with our gratitude. Another note - most of this build is being done in metric.  However, since most of my audience is used to inches, feet and pounds, we'll express dimensions in those terms.  My apologies to those used to the better system.  Magic numbers 25.4, .0394, .454, 2.2, 1.61, .62.  Oh, and 42. The project You may have linked here from TCPaddlesports.com or our Facebook page.  Or maybe from some other post.  In any case, this will be the story (hopefully not too long) of building a new low wash launch for our canoe/kayak racing club. RIP "Murphy" our aging coach lau...