Last thing late last night I decided to do a little more work on Naiad and so I fitted two battens of wood to the upper two washboards.

The purpose of these two battens is to prevent rain and spray from getting inside through the slight gap between the washboards.

The battens overhang the washboard and the top surface is rounded to allow water to roll off.

Apart from rounding the toe rails that have been fitted, the task of the day was to complete the fitting of the other sections of toe rail. The port aft section has glued well and the forward sections appear to have dried sufficiently to be glued.

The toe rails starboard side with the cramps removed and the tops rounded. I will probably put a fillet of epoxy along the inner rail/deck joint to give added strength but mainly to get ride of the corner which is always hard to clean.

The purpose of the toe rail is to prevent things placed onto the deck from falling off into the water, however, you want any water that gets onto the deck to get off as quickly as possible. There are two ways to achieve this. The first is to raise the toenail up a little on poles, called stanchions, so that there is a gap under the toe rail from front to back and the other is to put in scuppers. I've chosen to use scupper. One definition of scupper is

an opening cut through the bulwarks of a ship so that water falling on deck may flow overboard

You can see the scupper in the aft toe rail clearly here and it has been place at the lowest pit on the deck.

The forward part of the rubbing strakes that protruded above the deck have been planed and sanded flush and the end stops put in place. A mid stop is not going to be possible for these two toe rails since there is nothing to brace it against, so I will just have to be careful, hold the rail in place with one hand and apply the cramp with the other. The three remaining sections of hull have all been prepared ready for the epoxy.

The next few week's worth of lump wood charcoal. It is really cheap to buy it in bulk, around half of the price you'd buy charcoal from fuel stations or supermarkets, I've been buying it in lots of 25Kg which is 5 of these bags. I could buy them even cheaper but that would mean buying a pallet of 25 or 55 sacks. However, if I bought the planet of 25 x 15Kg sacks I would save myself £75 over buying the 5 * 5Kg sacks and £249 if I bought a pallet of 55 sacks.