The position of the garboard, that is the plank that butts against the keel, on the stem is vitally important if you are to avoid the planks developing what is known as a 'Yarmouth Hump' or 'snye'. This is where the planks rise and then dip to the stem; it looks awful! I mention this only to set the scene for our next learning experience...
These are pictures of the battens in place, if you look carefully at the bottom of the stem you might notice a gap, not a Yarmouth Hump I hasten to add but what we thought was an acceptable positioning of the garboard. Well the truth is that it wasn't and what you can't see is the muddle that occurred about half way along the boat where the garboard ended up very narrow indeed and was beginning to create problems. naively we believed we could resolve it and so we started Wednesday morning full of optimism.
Well by just before lunch having spent most of the morning horizontal on the floor trying to get planks to fit I decided that we would do what we should have done from the start, strip it all off and start again... This time we started by defining the width of the Garboard and then applied the well tried and tested formulae for calculating plank widths at each of the mould stations. It is I am assured a very simple formula, You take half the Girth, subtract the width of the Rubbing Strakes, add the Land and then divide by the number of planks and HEY PRESTO you are a candidate for extended therapy. Finding the correct solution took the application of CadCam, two tutors who couldn't seem to agree, and the two of us the better part of 2 hours and several false starts. However by a process of elimination we finally got it all into place and looking fair... Tomorrow we can mark it all up and move onto spiling our Garboards....
