VIRGINIA’s rigging crew hard at work Building continues, but is far from complete, aboard the pinnace Virginia, which spent her first season in the water after her June launch in Bath, Maine. The lower standing rigging is in place, ratlines done, and a few of the yards crossed and sails bent. Construction of watertight bulkheads is complete and the crew quarters are being fitted out. Some design issues are still being pondered: catheads or no catheads? Position of the gammoning knee? And where to put the swivel guns? In the non-seventeenth-century department, design work on the electrical systems is still on-going. In that, Maine’s First Ship has received help from retired electrical engineers from Bath Iron Works, just down river from where Virginia is docked, and from MFS volunteers who are former merchant marine engineers and masters. Fuel tanks are in place, engine room venting underway, and the engine should be on-line shortly. At press time, work on Virginia was winding down for the season. “The colonists who built the original Virginia in 1607 arrived in late August and probably thought the weather in Maine was perfect,” says rigger Jim Nelson. “By the time it was November they were probably rethinking that. Which is kind of where we are now.” The Kennebec River, where Virginia makes her home, 40
can be treacherous in the winter, thanks to currents and ice floes. Plans are in place to move the ship, hopefully under her own power, to Wiscasset, where the Sheepscot River is more free of ice than the Kennebec. There, work will continue to whatever degree it can until the ship returns to the Bath waterfront in spring. The current goal is to secure a COI next summer. H At the Jungle Shipyard in Costa Rica, SAILCARGO INC. continues to work on their flagship Ceiba, a 157’ three-masted topsail schooner. “For five years, Ceiba has been a skeletal structure of frames and beams rising out of the mangroves, but in the last six months, the gaps have started to close. Interior planking is now approaching the turn of the bilge and segments of deck houses are beginning to appear, giving an increasingly clear outline of the ship's final appearance. “This November, the shipyard celebrated the waterway's completion in the tween deck. Etta, Chris and Constantine did the meticulous work to fit these planks seamlessly into the framing. Each day on the deck below, the planking team lights the fire for the boiler that feeds the plank steamer. After six hours in the steam box, a plank can be bent into place with purpose-made threaded clamps. Once it has set into position, the plank must come off again for the last
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