Wooden Boat Festival

I was going to go hiking today, but I slept through the rendezvous, so I instead headed down to the Center for Wooden Boats to check out their annual Wooden Boat Festival.  Admission was free, but I put $10 in the donation jar when I walked in and various other amounts in other jars as I kept coming upon neat stuff.  All told, they probably got about $30 out of me and it was worth every penny.

For starters, in the park as you walk in there is this big pond.  And CWB had a sweet tent set up with over a dozen of the boats you can see serenely making their way across the pond.  All you had to do was walk over and check one out for free, but they did have a donation box (which I put money into).  Thanks to physics magic, all you do is put the boat in the water, give it a little push and they just go.  They find their way onto an appropriate point of sail based on how taught you have the main sheet, and just go.  If you had it pretty tight they could actually get going on a pretty good clip and heel pretty hard.  Sometimes they'd hit the buoys on the opposite wall of the pond and the nose would pop up out of the water.  Neat stuff.

The largest boat there was the roughly 100' Adventuress, which was launched in East Boothbay in 1913 and made her way around Cape Horn before there was a Panama Canal.  They do educational programs, and apparently you can volunteer to crew her.  Not sure if that is quite my cup of tea, but she was pretty and quite a work.  When she was refurbished they put metal bulkheads in that the crew described as "making her unsinkable -- just like the Titanic".

Then it was off to the Virginia V, a big steam powered cruiser with a triple expansion steam engine.  Also talked to the chief engineer there, pretty neat as that engine was built in Seattle in 1903.  He had tracked down an add from a trade journal in the 1900-1905 period, and even visited the road where the factory that made her once stood.  Didn't take a picture of the boat, but I do have a picture of the engine (although it doesn't do her justice).  Underneath was just this jumbled mass of connecting rods and valves.

Next was the Arthur Foss, a wooden tug that has the world's largest surviving Washington Diesel engine.  The guy fixing her up has apparently made a life of traveling around the world fixing up these ancient massive Diesel engines.  If you ask me that's pretty cool.  I asked to see what I thought was a reduction gear to the propellor... turns out it was the fuel pump!

This dinghy was made by Howard Hughes' company when orders for airplanes were not forthcoming.  The owner of the boat was quite proud of this particular boat, and I can see why.  The ship she was attached to was pretty impressive too, cruising at 19 knots!

Finally, we went on a ride on a 1906 steam launch (although the current engine is circa 2000).  The skipper was very knowledgeable, and answered all of my questions.  Pretty sure by the time I was done I had asked enough questions that I could have probably almost figured out how to drive it off.  He even let me steer for a while!  It was a 1 cylinder double acting engine, but it had just been overhauled, so it was a little sticky.  When he wanted to reverse, he usually kicked the flywheel to get her spinning again.