And the winner is....

Thanks everyone for the responses in the "What do you think of Jay's blog?" poll. Allow me to record the results here for posterity before I delete the poll itself:

• "It's perfect keep it up" -- 26 responses (89%)
• "Less talk, more pictures" -- 2 responses (6%)
• "Less pictures, more talk" -- 0 responses (hey I can dream, right?)
• "Shut up already and just build the darn thing!" -- 1 response (3%) (ok, who's the wise guy? :)

Taking a poll was a bit silly, but cheap fun. I'll do my best to keep up the level of detail, and even start adding more pictures to satisfy the two of you who marked "more pictures". These Blogger-based blogs come with a free gigabyte of photo storage, and I've only used a little more than half. So there's plenty of room for more! :-)

I've now finished planking the lower hull half and lower gunwale:

Next up of course will be dremeling the grooves between the planks, bogging them, and preparing for laminate.

Overall I think my gunwale lines are going to turn out much better this time; mainly because I followed the advice in other build blogs (and someone also sent me an email - thanks all) to run one side of the foam farther down, and then just butt the other edge into it. Much easier than scribing, and should make for less bog\lighter weight. Here's what I mean:

Last but far from least, I had a heart-stopping moment after getting home from work this afternoon. Looking outside from the kitchen window, I saw that the rearmost three or four sawhorses under my port hull half, had collapsed! Ack! My daughter went outside with me and helped me set it all back up. The aft 1/3 of the hull was basically holding itself up -- the hull is remarkably stiff. Not that I want to put it to the test anymore. If I was doing this again, I think I would try placing the hull half on concrete blocks sitting on the ground (levelled of course); the wind would have much less of a chance to get underneath that way.

And yes, I did have the hull tied down per the friendly advice I received -- we had a minor wind storm warning last Thursday, which made me get off my rear and get it done. Don't know why the sawhorses decided to slip now.