A Boat in the Woodsvideo
I Flew Across the Country to Fix This Boat and Sail It to Canada - No. 32
March 14, 2026 · 48 min · 242K views · Port Townsend, Washington, USA
What this video covers
Joshua, a Nova Scotia-based wooden boat builder with no prior Pacific experience, flew to Port Townsend, Washington to help deliver a newly purchased 85-ton Danish-built wooden sailboat, Ladyhawk, to Gabriola Island, British Columbia.▶ 0:08 The central repair challenge was a rotted plank below the waterline: the crew templated the replacement using thin plywood strips and a hot glue gun, traced the shape onto white oak using a copper-and-oak bevel gauge, and cut it with a circular saw.▶ 9:17 The oak refused to take the required twist even after two separate two-and-a-half-hour sessions in a steam box, forcing the crew to carve the twist into the plank rather than bend it in — a compromise driven by financial constraints, a miscommunication over plank length, and a fixed travel-lift appointment.▶ 18:03 Working until midnight and resuming at 5:30 a.m., they finished caulking with cotton and seam compound, applied bottom paint, and launched with two hours to spare.▶ 22:31 The passage north covered roughly 100 nautical miles, stopping at Watmough Bay on Lopez Island before clearing Canadian customs at Sidney and timing a transit of Gabriola Pass at near-slack tide to avoid dangerous tidal currents.▶ 45:04 When steam-bending fails to achieve the required twist, carving the plank to match the hull is a viable fallback under time pressure.
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