The last couple of days have been great. We steamed two planks yesterday and 2 planks today. There was a great turnout of volunteers and the weather was brilliant. Today we dug our way into the wood store and extracted some oak boards, left over from work on “Lilith” and “Southam”. Despite being bone dry, they’re still pretty heavy. We’ll use them for straight side planks on “Hazel”. Crossing fingers now that we’re going to be able to get the top bends out of the logs that we got from Cumbria. If not its going to be an expensive trip to Grimsby to buy another log.

We’ll be steaming more planks on Friday and Saturday. we’re pretty much ready now. I’m off to Liverpool tomorrow to get oakum from the Liver Grease Oil & Chemical Company. http://www.livergreaseltd.co.uk/ 

After a bit of a slow down through the winter, work on “Hazel” is picking up speed. We’re now 3 planks up, that’s halfway up, though we’re past halfway at the ends as there’s an extra half a plank at each end. We’ve steamed 16 planks, 12 more to go. Today was mostly about bolting the planks to the wrought iron Knees, though Pete Nicholson busied himself with fitting the straight middle plank on the starboard side. Steve the Viking and his partner Liz moved and restacked some of the shearing ready to be run through the planer to have its edges straightened ready for fitting. In the afternoon a hailstorm briefly halted proceedings.