Go slow while reading this because just like entering a no wake zone eventually boat building slows down and we have now entered the slow zone. Since the last week of July my teenage son Joey and I have been at the Farley Boat Works in Port Aransas building a wooden skiff the type of which has been built along the Texas coast for nearly 100 years. Unlike the popular Farley Boat planters that decorate Port A homes and businesses our boat is made out of Mahogany not concrete.

Early on our physical and mental fatigue was masked by excitement and adrenaline. Each morning during the first couple of weeks we arrived at 7am to work before the oppressive summer heat filled the tin roofed open air building. Some nights we returned after dinner to work well past dark-thirty. Some nights the mosquitoes didn’t show up. We made great progress each day and couldn’t wait for the next day to begin.

Eventually something had to go wrong. Fortunately when misfortune hit no one lost any fingers, no bones were broken and the woodwork wasn’t adversely affected.

Though my days as a US ARMY photographer are long behind me I still look for that great shot. Throughout the boat build I have photographed the events as they took place.

Rick Pratt, for whom the boat building school within Farley Boat Works is named, took off on his electric bicycle with a 10 horse power outboard in the grocery basket at the rear of his bike. Seeing a great shot I grabbed my camera, ran towards the open shop doors, slammed my right shin into the boat trailer’s steel tongue, hopped on one foot  trying to regain my balance, went horizontal, fell chest first across the outside retaining wall, tossed my camera a dozen feet then slammed my face into the bramble patch of dirt. Rick got away. You will just have to take my word for it that it would have been a great shot.

As if the bloody golf ball size knot that immediately appeared on my shin wasn’t enough we began fiber glassing the bottom of two skiffs soon there after but not before Joey had to return home to San Antonio to begin working on a film project and begin his senior year of high school.

Fiber glassing the bottom of a wooden boat might seem like a break with the past. But 100 years ago there were no power saws or sanders or lights in the shop or air conditioning or espresso machines. In keeping with the past there is still no espresso machine and the work shop is always hoping for a cool summer breeze.

These boats are built to use here on the Texas coast. Protecting the mahogany bottom of the boat from damage is prudent. Head over to the bulkhead at Charlie’s Pasture or Packery Channel and watch what floats by. It’s not what you see floating on the surface that damages boats. It’s what is just under the surface of the water that you don’t see that tears them up.

When fiber glassing the bottom of a boat it is best to wear an old long sleeve shirt but you must wear a respirator or quality dust mask and rubber gloves. The bottom surface of the boat must first be free of any bumps or clumps of anything so sand the wood smooth then wipe off all the residual dust.

Farley Boat Works stores it’s fiberglass on a pull roll and keeps a large pair of shears sharp. Pull the fiber glass over one half of the boat from stem to stern. Get the other side cut and set it aside. Mix up some two part epoxy and pour it on the fiberglass and start spreading it evenly with paint rollers. Next grab the rollers that look like medieval torture devices and start pressing down. Then repeat on the other side of the boat. You are trying to saturate the fiberglass and making certain there are no air bubbles trapped below the glass.

After soaking and rolling the epoxy deep into the weave of the fiberglass and folding the glass cloth around the corners of the transom and around the stem go clean up for dinner. Curing time for this stage is 24 hours.

There will be another coating of epoxy with a filler applied to fill in the weave of the glass and another 24 hour waiting period. A note about two part epoxy. It gets hot and solidifies as you use it. It can get hot enough to burn you in the mixing tub. Once that happens you have to discard it and use a new batch which is why one person is mixing while the rest of the team is applying. Epoxy smells bad and it turns out I am allergic to it. I will be using a full length Haz-Mat body suit next time.

After waiting the requisite 24 hours then sanding the bottom surface smooth we began the gel coating process. Mix apply wait. First one day, then another as we waited for the gel coating to clear. This gave us time to clean the shop and play fetch with shop mascot Marlena a beautiful two year old Boxer whose human is 95 year old Bubba Milina.

While building our boat we were joined by Wayne and Wendy Shack of Albany, Texas who were building a boat to auction off to raise money for researching the cure for muscular dystrophy. Like me Wayne owns a company hundreds of miles away. Both of us struggled with the decision to either answer our cell phones or cut them in half on the table saw.

None of us had any experience with gel coating and it did not go well. In the words of Shop Manager  Darrell Lynn "We had a catastrophic failure." The gel coating on one of the two boat’s bottom dried while the other was still tacky. Gel coating has an anaerobic curing process and adding heat or air to try and speed up the curing process doesn’t help. So we waited yet another 24 hours.

That’s when the boat build went haywire. We began cleaning off the green waxy build up that indicated the gel coat was cured with Acetone. In the process the Shack’s boat lost a lot of it’s gel coat while ours inexplicably lost a small amount. Next week we will explore how the boat’s bottoms were salvaged and how when all else fails at Farley Boat works somebody throws a BBQ party into the mix.