Getting up to hull speed...

The last few days have been a wash in terms of getting anything done on the boat. The specter of Tomas and Halloween played a part, the anchorage has been something of a roll fest, and the politics of the moment has been something of a distraction...

The truth of it is that my head has simply not been in the right space to get up to speed with lots of little starts and stops that simply sap the will and defeat momentum.

Most folks don't understand that the best tool for boat and boatbuilding projects is momentum rather than cool saws or nifty epoxies... Not that tools and better glues don't play a part, but too often they can be a distraction to the job of simply building a boat.

In a moment of deja vu the other day, I remember when we were building our Tiki 31 (a Wharram design) and our chosen building space was without electricity. We looked at various generators to buy (so I could plug in my power tools) only to find that the generator we wanted was back-ordered everywhere in France. Then one day while I was kicking around my building site and looking at the eighty sheets of plywood and my bag of tools, I simply got going and thinking to myself that "well at least I can cut out a bulkhead or two just to be doing something" and got out a couple of saws and started cutting... A couple of 10-hour days later, I had a very sore arm, some world class blisters, and all of the bulkheads and hull panels cut out. I now had a complete catamaran kit!

I mention this story as it is easy to fall into the trap of "needing" that one more thing or tool to get into a job rather than simply getting to it and doing it. In current hindsight, I am as apt to fall into the trap as anyone and sometime forget that the trick is simply to get to doing.