Ok, so a few major things have happened since I last posted during the middle of COVID. My wife and I decided to retire and moved to Lake Havasu City, Arizona. As you can imagine it put a bit of a brake on finishing up the PaperJet!
Once again I used the original building frame to car top it to Arizona
Nice thing about Lake Havasu City is that it is located on an awesome lake and also that it is the land of the RV garage. Yes! a boat builders paradise! (Of course come summer time the word "paradise" might be a bit optimistic as the temperatures get into the 115 F zone..)
First order of business was to install my Harken Kayak Hoist. With a 14-foot ceiling height it was quite the trick which involved some definitely non OSHA approved antics with an 8-foot ladder on top of the Tonneau Cover of a Ford F250. Definitely came under the category of being a contender for the Darwin Awards! Luckily both my friend and I survived the ordeal and we did not remove ourselves from the gene pool. Also due to the height of the ceiling I had to add some extra line to the Harken system so it could make it all the way to the top!
In the meantime we decided to sell our beautiful Beneteau First 30 which we had in a slip in Long Beach and replace it with a trailerable Seaward 26RK. We travelled all the way to Rock Hall Maryland to pick her up. She was a diamond in the rough and after 3 months of what can be best described as a "re-fit" she was ready to get in the water.
I mention this because this was yet another distraction from finishing up the PaperJet. So fast forward to October / November of this year (2022). I finally decided to finish up the project Step one was to figure out some form of a dolly system to both move it around the garage and also to eventually transport it to the water and launch it. After doing a fair amount of research on-line I decided upon the Dynamic Dolly. I got a hold of them, gave them the dimensions / picture of the boat and they recommended purchasing their dolly configured for the RS100. Nice thing about the dolly is that it is easy to assemble/disassemble and it works just fine for the PaperJet. The other nice thing about the dolly is that Dynamic Dolly sells a kit that allows you to mount the dolly to a trailer for transporting. As you can see in the picture below I also happen to have a Hobie TI on a trailer. I am hoping to be able to convert that trailer to allow me to swap boats (More on this sometime in the future).
The other item I had to sort out was building some form of mast crutch to transport the mast and boom. After looking various designs on-line I decided to build my own out of some oak plywood I had lying around in the garage. The forward crutch would rest in the mast step hole and the rear one would lay flat on the deck. After a bit of woodworking they turned out quite nice.
I had a wire luff installed on the jib so that it would work with a Harken small dinghy furler that a friend had given me. I had a trip planned to southern California and decided to bring the jib with me. I dropped it off at Ullman Sails in Long Beach and they added the luff and shipped it back to me in Arizona.
After waiting for a nice calm day my wife and I spent the better part of 5 hours or so of rigging the PaperJet for the first time. This included lashing the shrouds, installing all the lines and sheets, vang etc. It did take some head scratching to figure out the rigging of both the vang and the outhaul but after working through it we got it sorted. We were not able to put the mainsail up since the wind picked up and the mainsail is quite large!
One observation: The mast is a lot of fun to step (as in NOT!). It is very tall and a bit challenging to keep it pointed straight up while trying to step it on the boat!
So good news bad news. Good news is the boat is ready for its first launch in the lake. Bad news is that we missed the weather window (As in warm water temperature!) for the lake and will have to defer her maiden voyage to late Spring early Summer. At that time I will also figure out the trailering situation.
