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Blake
Boatworks
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P.O. Box 91
Gloucester, North Carolina
(252) 729-8021
blake@blakeboatworks.com
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Weekly Update
Notes from the Field - "Cherokee" Huckins Restoration Project
August 12, 2002 If a parrot lived at the Cherokee sight, he'd be
able to say "sand it again", "one more coat", and "git, Casey!" The pilot house is looking spiffy,
with a completed electrical cabinet and adjacent cooler. The breaker panel on the electrical cabinet
swings out for easy wire access. Steve Gilpin is not only a first rate electrician on such projects,
he is also plying us with his home-grown garden tomatoes and banana trees.
Electrical Panel and Built-In Cooler
Swinging Electrical Panel
The crew has begun cutting and laying out the teak decking. The decking visible above has been
glued down, while the aft decking (shown below left) is fitted and prepared for gluing.
Decking In Progress
Interior doors are being sanded, varnished, and hung. Below, Tom is
letting in the locksets for the pocket doors. The doors
are then taped so the inside panels can be painted white and the outside portion can be varnished.
The first doors have been hung in the master stateroom and guest room.
Tom Parker Straight and True with a Door
Doors Taped, Varnished, and Hung
Jeanette has been working tirelessly on the cabinet doors and paneling. Below she is holding
a door panel up for all the world to admire, with many more lined up beneath.
Jeanette with Cabinet Door Panel
Panels, Panels Everywhere...
Tom has begun installing the sprinkler system. Below left is the supply from the boat's domestic
water. The red rectangular box is a flow alarm that will alert anytime the sprinkler system is
flowing water. To the right, Tom brings up one of the legs of the Blazemaster CPVC pipe that
will supply the aft part of the boat and the galley. In the lower left-hand corner of
the bottom picture is the round white plate for the concealed pendant sprinklers, next to
an exposed sprinkler head.
Sprinkler Installation
Fire Suppression Sprinker System Parts
A porpoise fishery was based in Hatteras Village until the mid 1920s. It
consisted of a processing factory and eighteen fishermen who worked in camps up and
down the beach. The late Damon Gray, one of the last of the crew, described the operation in two
1970s interviews. A lookout man would signal the crew with a branch if a "waif" (a large school of porpoises)
was approaching. Four lap-straked dories worked the haul - two ran a light net out to
stop the porpoises, and two ran a heavier seine within that, pursing the school and
hauling them in toward the beach. The porpoises were hooked one by one "through
the blowhole", recollected Gray, and pulled ashore. If it was getting dark, the porpoises
were left beached until morning. They were then stabbed in the heart, skinned, and
carted to the processing factory where jaw fat was tried into oil for use in watches
and fine machinery, selling for about $1,000 a barrel. Blubber was rendered, and
the skin was removed and sold for use as industrial belts. The carcass was sold as guano.
"They would use everything but the teeth," Gray said matter-of-factly, reflecting a time
when marine mammals were thought of as just another fish instead of our underwater
soul mates. "They just left them right
on the beach". Signing off for now, Barbara "Fish Doctor" Blake
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