Brigantug! The Pegasus Gets A Refit

We had a lovely brief warm snap here this week, the temperatures were up in the low 80's on Monday, but things went back to normal yesterday and the cool air moving back in brought on a spectacularly stormy night - lightning, thunder, rain and hail. Good night for taxes, and with that task out of the way I decided to work on my Pegasus again. This business of not trying finish the entire thingummy in one go is something I picked up from Carol Lois Haywood, a wonderful California artist who like to show pictures showing what she calls "process", where she'll show photos of stages of things she's working on. I'm actually having a lot of fun NOT rushing through this and working on one piece at a time. Turns out you can make things look better that way. Who knew, right? :D

Last night I went to work on the details of the hull. I'd filled it in in black one night last week when I got home pretty late but still felt like doing a little work on it, that didn't take long so I'd actually tried to start on one of those three raised strips that run the length of the hull, but I got off to a bad start and decided I should call it a night (I was at least able to repair the damage). Last night I got back to those, proceeded with a lighter touch that worked much better, got them looking OK, did some shading, gave the puddenings (the big rope fenders) some lines to hang from and finished off with water, first the little spout that's coming out of the side of the boat and then the surface (more bubbles! more bubbles!). I was pretty happy with what I'd done and decided to share the progress on Facebook, where it met with an enthusiastic round of "likes".

My favorite response of the entire day, though, was waiting in Messages when I got back from a noon meeting. It was from a paddling friend who happens to be a graphic designer by trade (and a really good one, too, check out his website - you may not know his name but unless you're that hermit guy they just arrested for camp burglaries in Maine, you've almost certainly seen some of his work).

The message read:

Here. We're done. Now can we go kayaking?
Nice painting.  

And then I opened the attachment and nearly fell off of my chair laughing. Faaaaantastic! 

 

Updating on 4/12 - Copying in a comment that I made because I realized it would actually add some interesting real info to this flight of sail-conversion fancy:

The timing on this one was actually really funny because the night before I got it, I'd been hoping to go to a presentation called "Sailing Ships At Work - Past Present and Future". Rick Spilman, the Old Salt Blogger, was one of the presenters, <>sounds like it was a good evening. I couldn't make it in the end but Michael's conversion of the Pegasus came in while I was still thinking about that. Wind power is actually being seriously revisited these days, I wish I could have gone to the presentation.

There's also a great Tugster post in honor of the presentation, incorporating photos Will had done of a Mast Brothers Chocolate cacao delivery by schooner and a lot of other info - <>click here for that.

What really cracks me up is what a really sort of decent-looking tall ship the Pegasus's hull would make. She does have very nice lines though, one of my strongest recollections of a very interesting talk on the restoration of the Pegasus given by Capt. Pam gave once at the Waterfront Museum was when she started showing slides of the original designs and pointing out the beautiful curves of the hull (you can see some of those pictures on the restoration log.