As you spend more time in Quarantine the inventory of food in your larder may become limited.  Here are some suggestions.

One of the upsides of being in Covid isolation, I can spend more time on the model downstairs.  One of the downsides of this is that I seem to rush some jobs and the next day have to go back and rip it all out.  Still progress is being made.

The attached pictures show the railings on the fore deck and the aft deck finally mounted.   The posts were turned on a lathe.  I made many mistakes until I found the right combination.

I have no idea why on a merchant trader of 1490 they would have these kind of turned posts and railings… but that is what historical pictures display.

Finally getting to the stage where I do the rigging.  Always an interesting stage that leads to the finish.

We thought we would not get into the zombie panic about isolating yourself due to the Covid 19 issue… but it did kind of remind us to start to look at our inventory of food.

A couple of months ago (way before the virus issue) we had a speaker at our Club who told us how to prepare for the BIG ONE — in this case, the earthquake that will isolate our little island.  Make sure you have at least 2 weeks of food on hand and the mini propane tanks with a stove to keep yourself nourished.

Now I took this to heart and purchased an emergency device that, with hand cranking, would charge a battery and allow us to contact people and listen to a radio.  Thought it was so neat, I purchased one as a birthday gift for my brother.

Which kind of puts the rest of the family in perspective because I only bought one for my brother.

Anyway… the current issue about Covid 19 is telling us that if we come down with symptoms, we should be prepared to isolate ourselves for 2 weeks in the home and live off the larder.  Well, Costco is where you go for that.  Strangely, for some reason, people are thinking that Covid 19 leads to … well let us say … runny diarrhea so toilet paper sells out every day.  Go figure.

Even though I think that this is not quite that serious yet, we did look at our inventory and thought if we needed to isolate ourselves we needed more pasta and pasta sauce, and you can buy that in bulk at Costco.  So today I bought a huge package of a variety of pasta noodles and lots of Paul Newman sauces.

As it is Friday night.. and our friends Terry and Wayne left us with fresh smoked salmon bits, I decided to make a meal that Pat loves.  Smoked salmon Alfredo with peas on pasta.  The huge bundles of pasta from Costco came with Gemelli noodles so I decided to prepare the dinner using these.

Apparently a mistake.  Gemelli noodles must be the ones they serve in really poor areas in Italy.  The kind they would serve when they are in a 2 week quarantine.  Kind of mealy.

In any event we have lots of options in case the worst happens…   We have bottles of wine in the inventory and, while I may need to stock up on Rum, we should be Okay.

You may wonder why you are not receiving more blog updates.. but frankly, I have to be careful of what I post so as not to succumb to the many opportunities to go public and make big money.

Well probably not.. most likely it is because I am becoming lazy.  But here is an interesting blog.

As the title says.. I am making progress on the model of The Mathew that will go to Meagan and Jorg.  I am at the fiddly stage that I love.

This one is about the pumps that go on the deck.  Every wooden sailing ship leaks and gathers water in the bilge.  If you do not do anything you would eventually sink.  So a daily job for the crew was to pump out the bilge.  Remember The Mathew was from 1497 so there were no battery-powered bilge pumps.

It depended on the fitness of the hull as to how many leaks they had.  If you remember the song by Stan Rogers, Barrett’s Privateers .. he mentions the Antelope and as they sailed south “they pumped like mad men all the way”.  Obviously a leaky hull.

So how do you pump out a boat?  The same kind of pumps that were on farms, with a handle that you handled up and down with some effort.

The first picture is the pumps I made.  They actually pump (well not really) but if you push the handle up and down they move.

Second picture is of the pumps mounted in the model.  I kind of like this detail.  When the model is on display in the many years ahead, no one will notice this … but I will.  If you ever see this model in the future at M&J’s home, reach in and give the pump handle a wiggle.

Still, on the actual Mathew on its voyage to North America, I suspect this required hours of effort from some low life member of the crew….