Call of the SEA

It is not a lot. 13.6 by 8.4 m metal shed to house seemingly countless, but yet precisely counted items: sheets of plywood, hardboard, templates, wood, machine and tools, not mentioning all earthly belongings of 4 people connected by fate at the start of this project.

Some would think - and they do and often voice that thoughts without hesistation! - that Adam and I completely lost our minds not only starting to build a 38 foot catamaran on our own, but also doing so in the middle of pandemic, halfway through the lockdown. In addition, we not only want to build it but also gathered around this project the most wonderful band of misfits to achieve the goal and later to start a nation with them.

Well, they may be right.

The whole project came about during long weeks of lockdown. First the idea of building a couple of two 30ft Polynesian catamarans (one for each of us) powered only by wind an Sun slowly morphed into one of preparing a bit bigger cat on which we can not only sail and test our ideas but also gather some friends and work and live exclusively at sea. That one in turn developed into creating a whole community on water. The Sea Nation was born. At least in our minds.

Just few weeks more, lockdown has ended and we already sailed together on a small boat along the south coast. After all, we just spent over 12 weeks on land! Of course first thing we did was to buy a new (to us) boat. Yes, it is not a catamaran, it is only 24 ft and is afraid of a smallest of the waves - or maybe we are, used to much bigger and heavier boats, feeling extremely uneasy on this small NIMROD, dancing on small waves? Hard to tell. But we sailed her from Southampton to Thames Estuary anyway.

Another few weeks and we are ready to start. Two of Adam's friends arrived to help and we have plans for the boat but we still have to wait for THE MACHINE. The machine is after all a centerpiece of this whole undertaking - not so important for the project at hand but to learn how to use it is essential to our next steps. Adam works all hours on his computer only to spend all the money on materials, I work on taming the BEAST and learning how to transfer this beatiful hand drawings of Hanneke to a computer and later convert them into a file readable by THE MACHINE. All to have them later cut in an ideal, repeatable form without any chance of a human errors.

Ironically human errors plague this approach from a start. First hand drawings proved to be not precise enough for our DIY BEAST and therefore impossible to scan. No, not for me an easy choice of simple conversion - I have to draw, like Kuba on a floor in our small workshop (a shipping container) the whole drawing and only then divide it into pieces - but even that proved not enough. Either I or the program is at fault but I cannot get these elements correctly. Each cut shows yet another error!

Two months of trying and we are still at starting point. No trace of anything resembling a boat in our container yet and we are getting a bit restless. Not exactly what we have imagined... On top of that our landlord decides to hike our rent by 25%. Well, that decision had an impact on us as we suddenly realised we don't need to squeeze ourselves in a small shipping container but have a workshop worth the name. On top of that - we can move next to a marina and work in the area where our statement: "we want to build a boat" doesn't warrant us a blank look or pityful remark but actually sparks interest and true enthusiasm.

So we moved to Newhaven.

(to be continued...)