During the winter of 2015/16 I built a CLC Skerry. Recently I decided I wanted a bigger boat, and that I needed something to keep me busy during the Coronavirus pandemic. So in October 2020 I ordered a Pocketship kit.
Starting to glass the interior
Filleting the joints
This is a time-consuming step. First, I pulled out all the wires. Then I started applying nice rounded fillets of epoxy paste to all the joints. I am about 2/3 done, and it will probably take about 30 batches of epoxy (one patch mostly fills a 12-ounce plastic cup).
I also added a few cleats to the floors and bulkheads that I hadn’t glued in place before assembly.
Tack-welding the hull parts together
I have been applying epoxy to all the joints in the hull. When it cures, I can remove the wire stitches that were temporarily holding them together. It has taken three sessions of gluing to do this. The bow was tricky, because the joints are hard to reach, and the sharp bends in the plywood mean that the gluing has to be strong.


Wiring the hull together
The laying of the keel
Building the keel
Pouring the lead ballast
Assembling and glassing the hull panels
Working on the centerboard
More work on the centerboard trunk
Started on the centerboard trunk
Organizing all the parts
I went to pick up my Pocketship kit
I drove down to Annapolis to pick up my kit and a few other items. Fortunately my Skerry’s boat trailer carried the kit just fine, so I did not have to rent a van or trailer.
Because of Coronavirus, I couldn’t visit CLC’s showroom or check out their Pocketship, which was sitting under a tarp on its trailer in the parking lot. So I was at CLC for only 20 minutes or so. I also did some shopping at Fawcett Boat Supplies and West Marine, a couple of miles down the road.


It tool a while to unpack everything when I got home.

Making a set of sails
Preliminaries: finding lead
I’ll need a couple of hundred pounds of lead for the ballast. In the past, it was possible to get used tire weights from tire shops, but tire weights aren’t made of lead anymore. So I visited a scrap metal yard in Trenton and asked. They gladly sold me all they had, which was about 150 pounds – enough to get started.

