Please join us for the Guild’s annual dinner on Saturday, March 10th at the Pennsylvania Yacht Club, 2189 State Road, Bensalem, PA. We will enjoy a cocktail hour with appetizers, followed by dinner, dessert, and time to socialize with your crewmates away from the ships! Purchase your tickets here.
The Guild was informed last year that Pier 9 was being developed into public space, newly named Cherry Street Pier. The Guild relied on free use of Pier 9, which is owned by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, to store wood and equipment used in the maintenance of Gazela and Jupiter. Luckily, Holt Logistics generously donated 3 year lease on a 10,000 sq ft lot near the airport for our stuff. The Guild will have to build shelters for the wood piles, but at least there is now space for storing the existing timbers and all material being gathered for the next rebuild.
Our storage containers were moved down on December 5, 2017 thanks to Rob’s Towing of Bristol. On December 13, our volunteers loaded two truckloads of big timbers from Pier 9 plus two truckloads of wood stored at the Navy Yard. River Services donated their staff and forklift to load at the Navy Yard. And a crack team of volunteers unloaded in a driving cold wind. We have scheduled Monday December 18 for the last two loads to be picked up at the Navy Yard and delivered to the lot.
Bring a dish. Bring a bottle. Bring a friend and turn them on to the ship. Please email volunteer@gazela.org and let us know if you can help by bringing a big pot of something to eat or help with set-up or clean-up.
For those of you who are new to our little band of sailors and are looking forward to getting underway this season, we are offering sail training classes this spring.
Please register for one of the classes at this link.
This class, provided at no cost only to active Guild members, covers a variety of basic topics ranging from knot tying, line handling, learning the ship, emergency stations and watchstanding roles. For new members, you will receive a copy of the Gazela crew manual, a log book, and a complimentary piece of rope for knot tying.
On Wednesday, 29 July, Gazela entered Dry Dock No. 2 at Rhoads Industries in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She crossed the sill at 0805, followed by the barge Poplar, and the water was pumped out beginning at 0955; at about 1230 she touched the blocks.
This is the first time the ship has been hauled out in ten years and the first time the barge has been hauled out in probably twice that time. Once the dry dock was pumped out, the scaffolding was built around Gazela.
During the week of 3 August, workers and volunteers began taking off the copper and inspecting Gazela‘s framing and wood under the copper. After the copper was off, we began removing selected planks, which was accomplished with chainsaws, chisels, pry bars, clamps, big wooden levers, and plenty of teamwork.
The condition of the framing under these planks is better than we had expected, which is quite promising. We also started work on the thru-hull fittings, which will include replacing plastic fittings with copper or other material, and on removing the zincs (sacrificial anodes) that will soon be replaced with new ones.
With the planks removed, work started on prepping the ship for new planking (cleaning up seams, reefing seams, cleaning between the hull planking and the ceiling planking, etc.); in addition to this, the shipwrights began the process of roughly shaping the planking stock so that when the patterns are made they will be easier to cut.
During week three, we worked simultaneously on documentation, inspection, minor repairs to plank edges, and plank prep. There was spiling (using the space that the plank will go in to work up a pattern to make a new plank), cutting, steaming, and fastening, and by the end of the week we got the first plank of the project in and got another ready to steam.
With about fourteen more planks to make, we have a planer to get them to the proper thickness, after which the shipwrights will cut them to shape based on the patterns that they have made for each plank.
Getting the shape and size of each plank is critical, as they all have very specific places in the ship where they have to precisely fit. After the planks are put into the ship in the coming weeks, we will be putting copper back on.
During the first week, we started with chipping rust and power washing the hull, and we also removed the sole boards on the port and starboard side in order to clean up those spaces and inspect them.
In week two, we continued the rust chipping and moved all of the combustibles off the barge in preparation for hot work. We also began needle-gunning in order to further eliminate rust (and to try to make more holes in the hull, since this is our chance to fix them) and continued removing things that need to be removed/moved.
We continued the prepping of the barge for hot work during week three, and with all of the concrete and rust removed from the bow and stern rakes, we began the removal of bad steel in those areas and cleaning up the hull in preparation for welding and painting.