Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

For me fishing is great.

Catching is great, too, but to just be out on the water and be out in creation and, you know, just enjoy the beauty of the day.

It really is a great sport for me it is.

I very much enjoy it.

I'm building a boat, a fishing boat primarily, that will work out to be somewhere just over 18 feet long, and I'm building it out of wood.

So I really, in so many ways I'm designing and building this from scratch.

Well, I've been doing woodworking since I was in high school and I've built lots of things, from pens and pencils to dining room tables, dressers, and canoe paddles, things large and small and have just really enjoyed woodworking over the years.

And so I saw this as kind of the big project, and I may never want to be around sawdust again.

Started making technical drawings.

Drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing, tweaking endlessly until you come up with something that you feel like is in the ballpark.

And that's sort of what this design is.

This was kind of my early artwork, pretty rough drawing, but kind of got me in the ballpark of what I think would be a cool design for a boat, kind of trying to figure out these various kind of mathematical progressions that make for a good efficient hull design.

Several weeks ago I kind of took this and I said okay, I need to get more specific, you know, to kind of try out these various widths and angles and dimensions.

And so I drew two more drawings.

This, of course, is a side view of what the boat would look like and then a top view.

It's designed for a boat that we don't see a lot in northern Minnesota.

It's a tunnel hull boat.

Apparently you see see them quite often down on the Gulf of Mexico because one of the things about them is that they do really well in shallow water and I know periodically there are rocks and shallow spots in northern Minnesota and so that was one of the factors in designing this boat.

The other being that I wanted a hull that was, you know, would go through the water efficiently, so you're not burning a lot of gas to get to where you want to go.

That it would be a stable platform for fishing.

I will use a center console so that a person who's fishing or netting a fish or anything like that can work their way around the boat.

And so I want it to be something that you can get into and off of easily, easy on and off a trailer.

So those are all kind of factors that you figure on as you're kind of plowing through the design process.

And then after I was done with this, then I actually ordered up a computer software; it's not a software for designing boats, per se, it's a software for taking the boat that you've already designed, plugging in all the information, and saying okay, how well does it work?

Speed is not one of the things that I'm really after.

I'm not in any hurry to get to anywhere so it's telling me that I'm good and safe at the speeds that I have in mind.

So that much is good.

So after you've done all of this stuff and gone through the analysis and so on, then you take and go into the part of the process that's called lofting, which is basically taking this drawing and bringing it up to actual size.

And so I do two drawings, this is the back half of the boat.

What I do then is that as I'm actually building I will take this and I'll set it on my wood, my pieces of plywood and so on, and I will mark the important points on this and I'll make sure it's absolutely square and precise.

And I will mark those and then I'll move this off to the side and then I'll draw the lines on the pieces of wood and then I get out my jigsaw and all my other tools and I make the cuts that will give us that frame, that piece of the frame that makes that particular cross-section of the boat.

So this is one of the 12 cross-sections of the boat and we call them stations, sometimes people call them frames, but it basically is just one point in the boat that you put in a structural piece that gives the boat the strength that you want.

And so you may be able to figure out that this, of course, is the side of the boat, this curved portion.

This is kind of the bottom of the boat or they call it the planing surface.

It's also the part of the boat that keeps it buoyant, that picks it up and holds it on top of the water.

This part of it is the tunnel and, of course, they should be exactly the same on both sides.

So this is from one side of the boat to the other.

In kind of cutting to these lines it's usually like a three-step process that I take my jigsaw and I cut it, but I stay away from the line a little bit because I need that line to be there to kind of know that's exactly what I'm cutting for, then I come back, and I've got a power planer that I cut it closer.

Then I actually take a sander and I sand the last little tiny bit.

The next step on all of this was to build this frame, typically called a strong back, which is a nice rigid structure that you can build the boat on and it'll be not flexible and it'll keep the things in position and so forth.

And the other thing I did about it was I put it on casters so I can move things around if I need to get access to one side or another a little better.

Obviously I've never built a boat this big before and there's a fair amount to it and a little bit frightening I might say, but so far it's been working out pretty fair.

So the next step for me was to finish putting up all 12 of the stations and getting them nice and trued up and level and anywhere I needed to shim to get that so it was fairly precise.

And then, of course, the big thing was to put in this piece of plywood that's the top of the tunnel.

This is ab marine plywood that I was able to order.

The real trick of it, of course, is to make these splices because I need about 18 feet of plywood I have to have two splices in it.

So the way I achieved that was to epoxy one board underneath that I could screw up from underneath.

But, of course , I want this to be smooth so what I did was I laid down a layer of epoxy, put a piece of 6 ounce fiberglass on it, and then I put more epoxy on it and then a second wider piece of fiberglass and then I put three layers of epoxy on top of that.

And so what that gets you is a really nice strong splice.

It had to bend at roughly the same angle as the plywood was willing to bend.

And by the way, this plywood is not overly flexible so I had to kind of do it very slowly and carefully to get each one of the stations I had to epoxy and then put four screws at each point and then kind of work my way back to the point where it was nice and level and true.

So now I'm at the point of where I'm going to build up the part of the boat that's called the stringer.

And there's one on each side of the tunnel, and they're made up of these pieces of 3/4 inch northern Minnesota white cedar.

Kind of anticipating the angles that I have at front, I start up front, I clamp it down and then there again I have a splice.

Each piece of wood has to have what's called a finger joint.

You put glue in there, of course, and they fit together and they form a good splice.

The trick then is to have that splice in the middle of a curve.

So where I've had a splice I put a clamp on either side and make sure it's nice and tight and then I put a clamp right on it.

And I did this yesterday so this is all dried up and in good shape.

One of the things you don't want to do is you don't want to put the splice in the same place each time.

I'll be using a different kind of waterproof glue this time, one that sets up a little faster so that I can put on one strip now, another one maybe late this afternoon, and then if it works out, a third one before I go to bed.

And so I can actually get three of them laid up in a day.

You need to glue up a total of 13 strips in order to get the height you need.

Obviously in this section you have the greatest height.

So at the very far back end there's only six strips, but right at the very peak here there's 13 strips.

And the last of those 13 is only this long and most of it gets shaved off, too, to achieve that proper angle.

And you can see on the other side right now I've glued up nine strips.

And so I have, you know, I have a few to go to get to that point.

Then after I have all those strips glued up, and even before I start kind of shaving it, I take and sand both of these surfaces.

And I don't do that for appearance sake because of course it's on the bottom of the boat, no one will see it.

But both of these surfaces are going to have fiberglass on them and I want that fiberglass to lay nice and smoothly and cleanly against this surface.

Over the last few days I've been kind of planing this down and getting this surface so that when I lay that plywood on to form the planing surface, this will sit nice and smoothly against it.

And then, after I've got that situated, then I want the cedar strips to come around here and lay against this.

So I need to get this to be a fairly precise angle, and the way you do it is you take a real fine saw and you make a cut at the same angle and the same depth as where your station would go.

That's called a witness cut because of course it tells you then exactly how far to go.

So I finished laminating up the second stringer, and it's kind of generally shaped now.

With my planer I kind of brought it down to close to what the final form will be.

One of the things I'm going to be doing today is using my router to kind of flush trim it and get it down much closer to its final elevation.

And then a few days ago my wife and I put the transom in place, which, of course, is a big thick piece of wood that's going to carry that heavy motor.

It's the one thing that gets put on the whole assembly at an angle.

So this is at a 13° angle.

I had to set that in place.

And part of the trick of all of this is that now all of the boards from the planing surface, together with the cedar that's going to go on the side, needs to be cut flush so that it will come smoothly across the side of the boat and sit nicely.

The area that I'm cutting is actually on that red box there.

So after I cut each one of these, I lay in my strip to say hey is everything fitting and working right.

Because I have had a few of the stations where they don't lay down quite right so I have to tweak them a little higher, a little lower, in, out and trying to find that optimal spot.

And then the third thing that I'm working on right now is installing what's called the chine log, which is this piece of wood that extends all the way from the stem to the stern and it forms this kind of curve.

It'll be built up into five pieces of this 3/4 inch cedar.

Now I'm at that point where I, you know, take the clamps off so I can shave that down.

So first of all it follows the contour of the stations for the side but then also follows the stations for where the planing surface will come down.

And now I started putting on the plywood that will form the, like I say, the planing surfaces for the bottom of the boat.

This is 3/8 inch marine grade plywood.

It's a really terrific strong plywood, but the other thing that's nice about it is it also has some ability to flex.

Because obviously bottom of the boat isn't just simply flat, so I need it to be able to take some amount of bending, twisting, and so on.

So it's a matter of cutting a bevel in the sheet of plywood so that it matches up nicely against the chine log.

And then this is the transition piece between this piece of plywood and what will go next.

So this piece of plywood, as I put it on, is a little too big, on purpose.

So I want this to kind of marry up nicely, fit nicely on that end.

But as I put it on it extended further then I could flush trim it and sand it so that it's at the same peculiar angle that the transom is.

And then I came along and just started to sand that such that I have a a nice radius on that, a nice curve, so that when I put the fiberglass composite on, it will follow this nicely.

Then the next big challenge was to put on the plywood that's on this surface here.

And I tell you of all of the headaches, or things that kept me awake at night, it's how do you cut this shape.

And to be honest I didn't have a pattern so I just didn't know how I was going to do it.

And one day I had just what seems like an incredibly stupid brainstorm that I would just take a scrap piece of plywood and I would clamp it down as best I could.

I'd match up this corner and let the edge kind of fall where it did and I sat and stared at it for quite some time.

Then I thought, you know, if I take this corner and match the angle that would give me one edge.

Well that wasn't so tough.

But then I thought if I take a scribe, which is really like a compass, and I take and scribe the distance from where I want it to meet the strake and just draw a line on that scrap piece of plywood to best figure how that piece of plywood should meet the strake and that would give me a line.

And then I went back and took my good piece of plywood, this one, and I just matched that line, matched the angle, and I didn't care about what it looked like as long as it would overhang a little bit.

I took this piece of scrap plywood, I kind of translated the lines over to the good plywood.

I cut him, I set it on here.

And it was like it fit.

It was like not perfect, but it was really close, and I was really thunderstruck.

I felt like I was just really lucky.

After it was on then I came with my router and trimmed it so that it was flush with the outside of the stringer and then just went over it with, you know, the sander to kind of get the profile that I thought would be a nice smooth curve.

Then I have to create a splice between the different sheets of plywood.

So this one isn't all that important because it's not at a point there's a lot of stress in it, it's quite small anyway, and it's adhering there nicely.

So I just put a simple fiberglass patch on that.

But this is a point where it's much more critical and important that it be nice and strong.

I filled the groove with thickened epoxy, then I came back over and put a strip that was about 3 inches wide of fiberglass and filled that with epoxy and then a second coat of epoxy and then I came back and put on about an 8 or 10 inch wide strip, again filling it with epoxy and then a second coat of epoxy.

And then on the inside, you can't see it but there's a piece of wood that I attached to the station that gave me something, a good solid point to screw both pieces of plywood to.

So one of the next steps in the process is to install this little board here.

It has two purposes.

One is the board, together with the epoxy that's behind it, will strengthen that joint, you know, when the boat is being pounded by waves, it needs to be nice and strong and so this kind of muscles that up a little bit.

Then the other part of that is that when you're laying fiberglass over the hull it will probably, it might be a tiny bit challenging to get that fiberglass to lay nicely over this curve.

But then after it comes down, if this weren't here it would be a tight corner, and trying to work that fiberglass into that tight corner would be just really, really difficult.

And so to create this little transition piece where the fiberglass can lay on it and then kind of make a gentle turn and then come out into the tunnel will make it just dramatically easier to put that fiberglass down and have it look nice and smooth and continuous.

So after I got all of the planing surfaces on the top, I made everything so it had nice curves, and then I put in these two boards.

They are an inch and a half wide and 3/4 of an inch thick, and they are attached to each one of the stations.

And the thing of it is is that the inner board is the kind of more the structural board and the outer one is structural, too.

But I take my plane and then my sander and I cut it to the profile of the station so that as I put the strips on, that first strip will follow that profile, that curve on each one of the stations instead of being squared off like these boards started out.

These two pieces of wood are called the shear clamp, the top corner is called the shear.

So this is kind of the wood that connects the shear to the rest of the boat.

Then next step was to put on this first strip.

So this will be the first really visible part of the side of the boat that you'll see.

The way we did that was to put epoxy on the surfaces, of course, and then kind of gradually screw a little bit down and then bend it into position.

And then we put a few more screws in and then bend it into position and then a few more screws and so on until you get all of these, you know, screwed down nicely in the shape that you want.

After the epoxy has set up then I take the screw out, I drill a little countersink hole, I put the screw back in, and then I'll be putting a wooden peg on top of that that will be sanded off so you won't see the screw at all.

And it'll be a nice decorative surface.

It's kind of at a fun point in the process where, you know, it's starting to take that shape and really starts to look like a boat.

Each one of these strips is kind of a process in itself because it's a little hard to get access to in a nice clear wood that is 20 ft long and so I have to use three pieces to make up one strip.

And, of course, I don't want the pieces to overlap, or the, I'm sorry, the strips to overlap in the same spot.

So this strip has a nice splice here.

Well, then, the next piece has to come at a different place.

And you can see all of the splices are finger-jointed.

The other thing in this, and you won't be able to see it even with your naked eye, it's not as easy to see, but this surface and this surface are, of course, are parallel.

And this is a nice square surface but the top edge has a little bit of bevel to it so that as the strips form that curve there won't be a gap between the boards where the curve forms.

Putting the strips on is a really kind of long, drawn-out process because I only have 28 clamps, which means I have just enough to do one strip at a time.

So the goal is to do one strip in the morning, get the epoxy to set up most of the way by the time it's late in the evening, and then I can put on a second strip in the evening and then that'll set up such that I can do the next in the morning.

Well, as you can see on this side of the boat, it's looking, starting to look like a finished product.

All of the cedar strips have been applied, glued down, screwed down.

I've been doing some sanding on it.

You can see the color is different on the lower part than the upper part.

I was able to salvage this western red cedar to kind of build up the bulk of the side of the boat.

And then I found a source over by Deer River where a guy had northern Minnesota white cedar.

Exciting as it may be, this is the last strip that's going on the boat.

I will have a little bit more kind of little filler strips, but for the most part this is it.

What we'll be doing is putting a thickened epoxy on all of this surface and then all of this surface and we'll be putting screws through much of it.

And then at the far back end that will hold it in place.

Fair amount of progress has taken place.

We, of course, finished the outside shell of the boat.

And then, of course, the next big step is fiberglassing, which we've been doing over the course of the last week.

So what that's entailed is for these surfaces that take more abuse, that are plywood, I put on a heavy really thick fiberglass mat.

It's a 17 ounce per square yard mat.

It's thick and not very flexible so it's not very easy to work with.

And then you embed all of that in epoxy.

And it consumes a tremendous amount of epoxy to get that down and get it kind of worked into the corners and over the keel and down to the lift strake.

My wife and some other friends were immense help in this whole process because one of the aspects of it is to have somebody who's just constantly mixing epoxy for you so that then you can be putting it on, working it in, making sure it lays out nicely, there's no bubbles underneath it and so on.

After that was in pretty good shape, we let that set up and then came with a lighter weight fiberglass.

This is a 6 ounce glass, which isn't terribly heavy, but I'll compensate for its lightness with putting on extra layers of epoxy.

But both, in the end, will have seven layers of epoxy on it.

So it will be nicely built up and strong and should service well.

You can see over on the other side of the boat I'm in the process of sanding that heavy, heavy fiberglass mat down so that it's fairly smooth.

And then I put on another two layers of epoxy.

And so now you can see that it's getting moderately smooth.

And again I'll give this another good sanding and put on two more layers after that and then this will have all the epoxy that I wish for.

Obviously this is kind of the part you see so you want it to look nice.

Of course you do want to get, you know, any drips or irregularities you want to sand those out.

But you don't want to sand through the fiberglass, so it does require a little bit of care to kind of do it so that it works nicely.

Of course at the end of September we turned the boat over, which was of course a monumental event.

There you go!

It went supremely.

Well, almost supremely, but.

I'm enjoying it now.

Up to now I was, kind of, not so much.

No all looking good.

Of course right after that I then had to tear all the scaffolding off the top because of course the goal now is to get a finish on the inside of the boat.

Because one thing I'm looking forward to is being able to put it away for the winter and not look at it and think about it.

So I'm at that point where I'm working on the interior.

This kind of work is really kind of time consuming and putsy.

So you can see that the inside of the sides of the boat obviously had a lot of glue that dripped down.

I need to sand all of that.

I want fiberglass on the surface here, so I need a smooth enough surface so that that fiberglass will lie nicely.

In each of these spaces, these cavities, I have to do some filleting.

And if you remember, filleting is basically where I take a thickened epoxy, roughly as thick as peanut butter, and I make a radius inside there that makes a really nice connection between the two surfaces.

It's really an incredibly strong connection between those surfaces.

And I want that for basically anywhere where two members of the boat come together.

But then also I need to start putting the fiberglass on, and I cut this to be a little bit narrower than the space between the stations because it doesn't need to go up tight against the station.

Because once it's on and I have the epoxy saturated into the fabric, then I'm going to come and fillet this joint here, too.

So it will have that nice radius as part of that and that will make this, the bond between the station and the cedar that's on the side of the boat, it'll make it really nice and strong.

So this is essentially what it looks like after I've completed everything in the cavity between the two stations.

So I finished the filleting in between the stations.

I've gotten a really heavy fillet on either sides of the lift strake.

And then there's a sheet of fiberglass that I've put here.

And then all of these surfaces have gotten a layer of tinted epoxy.

So you'll see there's a bunch of bungee cords.

I've got a tarp coming that I can put over the whole mess, I'll set it outside, and that's where it will stay until the the spring comes and the snow melts and I can go back to work.

How far do you want to go?

The only remaining task really for me is to figure out how to stop thinking about it now for three or four months and laying in bed at night and wondering what I'm going to do next.

Piece of cake, we're home.

Since we've gone back to work this spring, there's been a handful of things I've been working on.

Probably the most obvious right now is to put in all of these little strips of good old northern Minnesota birch.

It's nice wood, it's got a good strength/weight ratio.

Now clearly one of the problems you have with a boat like this is that you can't put a screw into the edge of a piece of plywood, and so anytime I want to attach anything I have to put on, again, one of these little strips.

There are two points where I've put in kind of a reinforcing piece here and then also in the back so the idea being that as I pull the boat up to the dock it will be this point that a person will step onto the gunnel then down onto the deck and then onto the back deck, if that's where they're going.

And then, of course, the sides we're going to be putting on a gunnel on the edge here that'll be about 6 1/2, 7 inches wide.

So I have a number of pieces of wood that are 3/4 by 3/4ers, and what we'll be doing is applying adhesive to the side of the board that we're attaching it to, but then also to the face of the shear clamp, so that as we put it in place and then we clamp it down so it lays smoothly upon that surface.

So they finger joint together, which is a little bit of a trick, of course, kind of shoving them together in the middle of a curve.

Again build it up all the way to the back end.

I leave them hanging off the back end and then I cut them flush.

This side of the gunnel is getting close to complete.

When I had first started we put down that first strip and it was glued.

And you can see how we put screws in it, too.

The hope was that I could take two or three additional strips, put those on, glue them all up and go away and let the glue set until I had all seven done.

Each strip kind of had a mind of its own, and so we had to end up doing them one at a time.

It really took several days to get the whole thing finished.

Then I will be putting a strip of hickory on the outside that will hang down just a, it's a little bit wider than the cedar itself will stick out there and, again, take abuse for if the boat bumps into something.

And hickory, being a much harder wood, it'll have that on the outside and on the inside.

We finished up the gunnels on both sides, although they're not quite done, and then I put in these two pieces of decking in the front and back.

These are sort of temporary because eventually they will have a layer of the cedar put on top of them together with fiberglass and a rosin coating that's a good material to walk on.

I need to start building the kind of boxed in area that will be that storage space in the back and the transom well and where my back battery is.

What I've just started on is kind of building this boxed in area here and this will be where the rod storage is.

And then what I'm getting close to finishing is this front deck up here where Char and I have been gluing on the cedar veneer that will kind of make that front deck area.

And, of course, the idea being that it will be, you know, that beautiful kind of stripped cedar look to it that will be the same as the gunnels.

So the goal is that I'll have a lot of this kind of deck work done over the course of the next 2 or 3 weeks.

The primary thing I'm doing today is I'm working back in this kind of transom area.

I've set up these tubes to go through this so that my fuel lines and my steering cables and my shift cables and any electrical that needs to go from the console area back to the engine can go through these three tubes.

There's one tube on this side and two on that.

I'm going to mix up something called flotation foam and I pour it down into this space, some on this side and some on that side.

The idea being that it will foam up and then turn hard and it will provide flotation if the boat were to ever hit a rock or a log or anything like that and start to fill with water.

This area back here, the foam that I'm pouring today would provide somewhere between 4 and 500 pounds of flotation that would keep the heavy business, the engine of course is back here, it would keep it afloat enough so that it wouldn't totally submerge.

Over the last several days I've been working on finishing up these back decks back here.

There's a little bit of structure that I built underneath here to just make this just a little stronger.

And then I put on a piece of half inch plywood in this area glued and screwed that down.

And then on top of it I put the same white cedar that I've had with all the gunnels and decks and everything on this surface and then trimmed it with the same hickory that I'm using on this surface here.

Most recently I have started working on fiberglassing again.

Obviously this front deck area got it nice and finished, did a final sanding and then put on this 10 ounce fiberglass cloth and wetted it out with the epoxy resin.

Now I'll have to come back and do some sanding to make it nice and, you know, uniform and smooth, and I'll put on one more coat of epoxy over that.

Hopefully that'll give it kind of that final look before putting on the spar varnish.

And then today I'm continuing on back toward the stern of the boat, just putting on more pieces of this same fiberglass.

It's kind of fun when it gets to this point and the wood starts to stand out as though it has a finish on it and really starts to look like the wood.

I've finished at this point putting on the fiberglass all the way around on the front deck and the back deck and the gunels and so forth.

Put that all on.

I have sanded it and anywhere there were shapes or transitions or where the fabric overran or anything like that it had to get sanded down so it's nice and smooth.

Here in the coming week I'll be sanding it more and getting it ready for that last coat of epoxy, which will leave it nice and hopefully nice and smooth and gorgeous.

I'm getting ready for the rod storage tubes, involves these 3-inch PVC tubes which is where kind of the bigger part of a rod will go into.

Then it transitions down into this narrower part that goes all the way to the end.

And so between the end of the tube and the end of the kind of the box that it can sit in, it'll accept a rod that's 7 feet or a little bit longer.

So over the last several days what I've been working on has been first this side of the boat, where we cleaned it up and we put a fresh coat of epoxy on that cedar surface.

I wrapped up the three rod storage tubes on this side and cut a hole down there that will kind of give you, kind of, the access to the rods as they sit underneath the deck.

In the last couple days put in these three rod storage tubes and just this morning cut that notch where you, again, where you'll get access to the rods as they go into the tubes.

And then under this section of the deck there's another nine pieces of flotation foam underneath there and this will support another 5 cubic feet of flotation, which works out to be about 450 pounds of material that it will support.

Then under the front part of the boat there's another big block of foam right here that will support another 350 pounds of flotation.

At the very bottom of each station we drilled a hole that was about an inch and an eighth in diameter.

That's right down at the bottom of the bilge that goes all the way from the front to the back.

There were two points in the boat where I decided that in drilling this hole I was going to put in a copper sleeve and that was so that I could put in a drain plug so that it would go in and fit and there wouldn't be any problem with it leaking or wearing out or anything like that.

So over on this side where the narrow piece of decking will come up, I needed just a little bit more support right up at the tip, so I glued in this block just to the hull, and I glued it in just a little bit high so that then I could shave it down with my sander and bring it right down to the elevation that the deck would be.

Last time we were here we were finishing up the rod storage tubes on both sides.

Those are all nicely aligned and in place and you can see I put foam around them just only for the reason that as the boat bounces across the water they won't rattle.

And then after I was done with those I set the gas tank in place and have a nice strap around that so it too won't go bouncing around.

There are various parts to the gas tank, of course.

I have the fill tube that eventually will come up here and go through the gunnel and have a nice cap to put gas into it all.

There is going to be a vent tube that will sit behind that that allows air to get out of the gas tank as you fill it with gas.

And then, of course, there's the fuel line that heads in this direction and I'll put in the little pump to prime the gas back to the engine.

And then I need to drill a hole in these four stations such that the fuel line can go through there, up through that piece of conduit, come up back in that back storage area.

And then I'll wait until the time comes to mount the motor and I can drill a hole through into the transom well and then have good access to the motor.

Also, as part of the gas tank, you can see there are a couple of wires connected to the top of it and that's just the device that tells you how much gas you have.

And of course it'll be connected to a fuel gauge that's up on the console.

Then over on the side I've got a whole bunch of wires that are running from the console area up to the front of the boat.

Two big white wires are the wires that are going to connect to an outlet that'll be mounted up front here that the trolling motor will plug into.

And then the batteries for the trolling motor will be right back here underneath the driver's feet.

The two other wires, one will come to a little power port here that I'll mount in this, on this piece, and it will be what we used to call a cigarette lighter.

And then the last wire will come to two lights that will be mounted on either side that are the navigation lights that are required by the Coast Guard if you're ever out at night at all.

So now we're in the middle of this big push to get all the decking on.

So I've got these two pieces, the big aft deck, there will be a bench seat in the far back, and then the driver's seat will be right here.

And this space right here will have the batteries and, of course, that will have a cover over it so you can put your feet on them.

And then of course this is the fore deck.

It's made up of a 1/2 inch piece of marine grade plywood together with that beautiful white cedar that I glue on top of that.

I put a coat of spar varnish on the underside of it just to kind of seal it up.

I glue on the cedar and then I put on 10 ounce fiberglass fabric and then a resin to fill the fabric and make it transparent.

Then on top of that I put on two coats of spar varnish that has an additive which will make this generally slip resistant.

So obviously it'll get wet, and you don't want people sliding around on the deck.

The decking for the back end is all done, we've got it generally fitted and in place.

I don't have it screwed down yet, in part because my wiring has to go underneath this one.

So I'm at a point where I'm working on a whole bunch of different projects all at the same time, in part because I just need to make progress on a whole bunch of little things, but also in part because it kind of keeps me from going crazy.

But this one is kind of a fun thing that I'm putting in the boat, it's a little shelf, and I'll have one of these on both sides and there's an insert that will go in the larger hole that will hold your coffee cup or your beverage.

And then I'll put a little sleeve in here and this will be a rod holder.

There will be a hinge on the bottom so a person can still get access to storage and then there will be a latch up on top.

So this is the front seat that will situate right in front of the console, and as you can see it's almost done.

I've put two coats of epoxy on it and then two coats of spar varnish so it's really looking pretty good.

The only thing that remains to be done is I'm going to put an upholstered seat, that'll be, you know, have nice padding and will sit on top of here and then there will be a hinge on it, so in here will be the storage for a cooler so if you want to put fish in it, and also two smaller coolers for minnows and leeches or nightcrawlers or anything like that.

So this is what the console looks like in its fairly crude form.

This would be the point where I'm going to put a piece of plywood across here so the steering wheel will situate right there.

There will be a set of switches and gauges that will sit up there that'll run, you know, bilge pump and navigation lights and any other lights that I have in the boat and also the fuel gauge will situate up there.

And then behind it will be the fuses for any and all of those circuits.

All right.

Well today I'm going to be installing the final connections for filling the gas tank.

So right here in the gunnel will be the cap that you put your gas in through.

It'll go down through this little 45 elbow and then into the gas tank which is underneath the deck.

There it is.

I can fill my gas tank.

You maybe could call them little pigeon holes, but they are designed to be just exactly the right size for a little tackle box tray.

Now that it's up here I've got lots and lots of little things to do.

I've got a set of cleats that are on the back corners here, another set of cleats toward the front, and those, of course, will hold bumpers.

When a person wants to step off the dock and into the boat there's a little footstep there.

So I've been installing all of these little things.

Bigger thing is to install the bench that will go up in front of the console.

Then we've got the bench for the driver.

So I'm at the point today where I need to be cutting this notch in the transom so that the engine will sit down on that.

And I want that cavitation plate to be right about here.

And then I built that transom well and I fiberglassed all of that and tinted that fiberglass so it's kind of the same color as the inside of the boat.

Of course before I took it to the place itself, the motor, I had installed that aluminum plate.

I can't put into words how much joy there is in seeing it completed and feeling like it, in its way, is a work of art.

Getting it out on the water and, you know, feeling it pound the waves and, you know, that will be the time when I can relax and feel like, okay, it's all good, it's all good.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.