I expected the plan-drawings to come in two or three weeks, however, I was to learn that the mail from America takes a long time and some ten weeks later, at the end of my break from university, I finally got the plans.  Your probably wondering where this story is taking place:  at the moment the story is located in Brisbane, Australia.  I would be disappointed if you do not know where Australia is.  Here is a map of Australia and you can find Brisbane in the middle of the east coast.

Ply boats start their lives as a couple of flat sheets of ply, like this...

  I tried to plane the scarf joints of my ply with a number 5 Stanley wood-plane I inherited: it had a blunt blade and this procedure was not a success.  My brother-in-law saw me working on the project and offered to help; he had boat building experience.  I was later to wish the brother-in-law kept out of the picture in this boat building task, which I will reveal soon.  My father could also see that I was out of my depth and joined with me in the building of the boat at most of the steps.  It was a good bonding exercise for me and my father.  Maybe it was because I was an adult now that I could see my father more as a person; I did not see a lot of him in my teens.  Of mention during this phase of the building was the ‘help’ I received off the brother-in-law; after Dad and I had carefully marked, cut, wood-planed, and sanded the panels to the perfect shape that could be achieved by hand, we were ready to turn the two dimensional, flat, ply panels into the three dimensional shape of the boat by stitching them together with wire.  The brother-in-law came to help stitch the panels together with wire; he said ‘I’ll fair up your panels for you’, grabbed a wood-plane that was near-by and started to skim wood off of my perfectly correct panels.  I was speechless while he was doing it but managed in my shock to say ‘put the plane down’.  I said the panels will have to be redone.  Dad and Brother-in-law said that it could not be done and the brother-in-law said he did not take that much off the panels anyhow.  When the boat took shape as it was stitched together there was a very pronounced concave ‘whoop’ in the keel-line where the brother-in-law had planed-off the panels.  It took me about eight hours over a few days to correct the miss-shaped section with wedges until I got the shape I thought the boat was meant to take.  (Small wooden wedges are put between the panels where they need to be expanded correcting the shape.)

(This is a picture of the wiring together.  It is the second Chesapeake I built and has never been finished to date!)

A few words of warning: never lose your voice, and take charge of what is going on around you – do not feel you are not in charge of your own building project.