The Montauk Catamaran Company Chronicles, 01/03/15: The Anniversary Edition

(The Montauk Catamaran Company Chronicles is an ongoing series of posts detailing the construction of Mon Tiki Largo, a James Wharram Designs Pahi 63 MkII. The author’s current boat is the catamaran Mon Tiki, a JWD Tiki 38, which he built in 2012 and currently operates as a day-sailing charter in Montauk NY. You can see all the posts in this series by clicking here.)

It has been Christmas Break here at The Montauk Catamaran Company Boatworks, which we like. My wife and I enjoy our children’s company, and if they didn’t enjoy school as much as they do, we’d be happy to have them at home with us. Also they make for cheap labor. That’s our eldest, Maggie the Ballerina, on Christmas Eve helping me get another lam-beam core cheeked up. Maggie’s been helping me build boats in this driveway since she was old enough to pass me tools, which is about 12 years now.

As we’re coming to the end of the beam construction we’re getting to the bottom of 1″x6″ stock, which is to say the first material that we put through our double-pass scarfing jig. We hadn’t quite got things dialed in and it shows on these pieces, so we decided to stack up the planks and dress the ends with a planer first and then a belt sander.

The nicely dressed ends made for easier work when the scarfs were laid up, and if I had to do it again I’d have dressed all the ends as above. Live and learn

As hinted at in the title, today is my and my wife’s 18th wedding anniversary; and as mentioned just above, that’s the last of the 1″x6″ stock arranged to dress the ends. Each adjacent pair in the stack will have the best fit; the marks are to keep track of the pairs when the planks get set aside. That’s how we spent our anniversary.

We got married 18 years ago today at City Hall in Manhattan. We had been engaged for about 9 months, but my wife hates fussy things so we hadn’t made a plan for the wedding, then it turned out my family was going to be in town around that time anyway, so it seemed like the thing to do. Between my immediate family, plus of most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins, plus Amy’s very large family (she’s the youngest of nine) there were about 50 of us in the very small city hall chapel. The justice of the peace puffed himself up very ceremoniously to officiate for the unusually large crowd, and then got our names wrong. (My wedding name is Edwin; Amy’s is Nancy.) Everyone fell out, then we took the R train back to our neighborhood (Hells Kitchen) and had a reception at a place on Restaurant Row.

A lot of water under the bridge since then. Some hard times and genuine tragedy. But also many, many blessings. We are celebrating tonight by getting take out — Mexican and Chinese. Do I know how to show a girl a good time or what!

Blessings to all of you in the New Year too.