The fifth Wednesday of January brought us together and once again in the shop, moving forward with our Skunk Island Skiff and each of the girls’ respective bench projects. Our board question for the week was, “What did you do during the snowfall?” Answers included, trying to make snowmen, reading, baking sweets, and staying cozy indoors. Due to the snowfall, we did not meet last week, so the girls were eager to pick up where they left off in the shop.

We bonded through a really fun exercise of working together to flip a mizzen sail – that we were all huddled together standing on – from one side to the other. The object of the activity is to work together to steadily flip the sail without any feet touching the ground on the edges of the sail. We tried a few different strategies, and finally we figured out a way to accomplish our goal together. We held onto one another’s shoulders and let each other know where we should move our feet to keep from touching the ground. It worked! And it was really fun.

On our Skunk Island Skiff, our instructor K, and students Sam and Hilina made headway with installing the starboard chine batten. This required doing layout for the fasteners, drilling pilot holes, and then applying Sikaflex to the interior side of the batten, holding with hands and clamps, and finally, securing it with fasteners. All the girls working on their bench projects made progress with cutting out half laps, and working with the grooving plane and chisels.

The next couple weeks we are looking forward to assembling our bench projects, and the haul out of ‘Onward’ the boat we use for our rowing and sailing activities out on the Bay.