All Hands on Deck!... All Four of Them

The amount of time I have for this undertaking is fairly limited, so to help me with some of the grunt work, I've decided to recruit a strong back of similar semenship (hehe) as myself.  My brother Zack (also a college student) will be home for the summer, so he has passionately accepted my offer to join this little project!  With his help, meeting my deadline of August 31st should be quite doable.  Welcome Aboard!

Also, a great breakthrough in the technological realm of this project has been made as well!  While visiting my mother for her birthday, I decided to go talk with her neighbor Gorman.  Gorman is a very intriguing man.  He is fairly tall with a long gray beard.  He looks like he could've very possibly been Merlin in another life, and his demeanor would suggest the same.  He's the kind of person you feel like you should bow to when you greet him, and I'm fairly certain he has single-handedly done in a few dragons in his day .  Most importantly, he had spent several years living on a sailboat in Guam and has built several beautiful boats from scratch.

When I was a kid, Gorman had always invited my brother and I to go sailing with him.  As most people do with golden opportunities, we took his offers for granted and always were "too busy" to accept.  It wasn't until he got older that I realized how interested I was in sailboats, and until recently, I had been too guilty to go talk with him about it.  This weekend, I realized how stupid that mindset was.  How terrible it would be to never learn from him, to let all the knowledge and wisdom he has always been so eager to bestow on me pass away forever.  So, I knocked on his door.

 He answered with that understated hospitality that people in our generation don't have a grasp of.  He offered me some pie and Chris, his wife, poured me some ice tea.  He offered me a seat at their dining table and immediately began telling me about the America's Cup, which is THE sailing competition.  Those guys defy physics; it's truly amazing.  Anyway, what I also found amazing was that he went straight into this without my ever having mentioned why I had paid him a visit.  Granted, this might have been because Mom might've mentioned something to him, but I prefer to think it was telepathy.
Long story short, after talking with him about what I was wanting to do, he handed me a library of books (including The Gougeon Brothers On Boat Construction, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, and Building Strip-Planked Boats) and offered me his workshop whenever I wanted to get started!  I really don't think I'm worthy of such kindness, but I'm so grateful he thinks so.

You know, our generation really has an issue with thinking we know it all.  Sure, it's typical for people in their twenties to feel on top of the world, but we really are being groomed to think we somehow have all the answers.  The other day, one of my professors went into how he was practically a dinosaur compared to what my generation knows in regards to electronics and the Internet.  Of course, this is from the same guy that went on a rant about how greed is a virtue, but he's not the only professor I've had to tell me that I'm part of some privileged group that doesn't need to listen to the wisdom of my elders.  Sure, I grew up in the Internet age and many older folks aren't too Internet-savvy, but so what?  I've watched so many smart-ass kids my age practically ignore older people in electronics stores because they, OMG, wanted them to explain what a USB cord was.  Every generation has had a technological advance that sets them apart from older generations, but this is the first one that has completely empowered a generation to believe they don't need to heed the wisdom of the people who actually invented all the technology they take for granted... I could go on and on, but you get the point.  Don't take your elders for granted, dammit!

So anyway, the armada is finally coming together a bit.  With an extra set of free hands, time should not be too much of a problem.  Also, I've got some reading to do, but thanks to Gorman I now have enough information to get started really planning out a boat, and I also have the equipment to actually build the boat once summer rolls around.  Unfortunately, I haven't figured out an answer to my financial predicament yet...

I think that's enough for today.  Hopefully I'll finally start to get to all the technical fun of this project soon.  For now, here's the nautical term of the day.

Term of the Day:  Broad in the Beam
If anyone has ever said this about you, you know this isn't exactly a complement.  For those of you who haven't been blessed with this experience, it means you have a big butt, or more correctly, wide hips.  The nautical origin of this phrase can be understood once you know what beam means in a nautical sense.  The beam of a ship is the widest point of a ship.  Also, if something runs parallel to the beam, it is said to run athwartship.

That being said, my new crewman is a bit broad in the beam...