wilddog

Member

From: Devon

Registered: 22 Dec 2013

Posts: 143

Fitting the painter

With my Skerry built, my attention has turner to rigging her.

One issue that has me vexed is where to fit a fastening for the painter. The plans suggest that I should cut a hole through the bow stem and fit an eyebolt. However, I am nervous about this operation firstly as I think that the stem is so pretty and so fine (ie. pointy) that the eyebolt will have nowhere to sit on the bow and secondly as I think that despite the galss tape inside and out, the eyebolt will probably need a decent block of timber to be fixed to to be of any use for fitting an anchor or for towing should the need arise.

With towing in mind (in an emergency you'll understand!), I understand that the painter fastening should be as close to the water line as possible so that the boat can ride as flat as possible, so fitting the fastening for the painter as per the plans would seem to make sense, but need to be convinced.

Has anyone got any thoughts? Is there anywhere else that I can reasonably fit the painter on the skerry?

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Built a Skerry!

Yambo

Member

Registered: 17 Jul 2014

Posts: 35

Re: Fitting the painter

I fitted a D bolt to the bow of my Skerry wilddog. It's located about 4 inches below the rub rail and it's used all the time for mooring (you can see the mooring line attached on one of my photos in the launch thread). I usually swim out to the boat, hook a line onto the D ring with a carabiner, remove the mooring carabiner then tow her to the beach on the D ring. Same on return.

It can be awkward fitting D bolts so I made a jig that fitted over the bow to get the angles of both holes correct. The D ring has a metal plate on both sides of the hull and seems pretty strong to me. The Skerry is very light so there's not a lot of strain on it but a couple of weeks ago I rowed about 4 miles round the coast and got a tow back - it was fine.

Last edited by Yambo (4 Sep 2014 11:57 am)