The Moaning Chair...

Howard Chapelle's classic 1941 text, simply entitled Boatbuilding, is about as close to the Bible as a book can get in the field of wooden boat construction. In its introduction, he advises the following:

“In every amateur boatbuilder’s shop there should be a ‘moaning chair’; this should be a comfortable seat from which the boat can be easily seen and in which the builder can sit, smoke, chew, drink, or swear as the moment demands.”

The wisdom of this bit of furniture has become remarkably apparent to me over the past few days. You see, my keel timber has ringshake. 

Ringshake -also known as 'wind shake'- results from a bacterial infection within a tree while it is alive that destroys the wood fibers connecting one annual ring to another. When the tree is felled, it may be invisible, or present itself as a fine dark line along the circumference of one or more the annual rings. As the timber dries, however, the fibers will often separate along this arc, and in extreme cases, the entire piece will simply fall apart along the compromised ring, as illustrated in the following photo that I found on the 'net:

And so it was, shortly after delivery, as I was coating the four sides of my keel timber with a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine to help it season, that I noticed it. Below is the end of my keel timber. It has two concentric cracks: the one that's clearly visible from (A to A'), and a second less visible one from B to B', outside of the first. I discovered the latter when pouring the oil into crack (B) on the top surface caused it to start weeping out the endgrain around (B''). Subsequently, I poured oil into crack (B') while the timber was vertical, and noticed it dripping out at (B), confirming that the two are connected.

My growing realization of the implications of this discovery mirrored to no small degree the stages of grief. At first, I told myself that the defects could surely be worked around. The more I thought about it, however, the more it dawned on me that whatever their surficial manifestation, it's nearly impossible to tell what's going on deep inside the timber; even if the currently visible shakes are avoided, they may open up again once the keel was cut to shape. There are two primary dangers to that - (1) it may undermine the structural integrity of the keel timber, and (2) if one of the shakes opens up as it crosses the rabbet -where the lowest course of planking interfaces with the keel timber- it could cause leaks. 

Here's the end of the sternpost. One small chunk has already fallen out at the end along the circumferential cracking. I certainly wouldn't want anything like this happening on the keel timber. If this one chunk is all that falls out of the sternpost, it could be worked around, but the pattern on the end grain -the big radial check in particular- is worrisome. 

Here's one of the deadwood pieces, which has some of the most severe shakes, extending nearly halfway through the piece:

Last weekend I showed these pictures to an experienced local shipbuilder who worked on the Susan Constant and Kalmar Nyckel, and he mentioned that in his experience this sort of thing is a common problem with Angelique. In light of that, and the fact that I'm probably only going to build a boat this size once, I'm feeling pretty uncomfortable about using these pieces for the backbone. 

The good news is that I've been in touch with the yard who sold me the timbers, and they've been incredibly sympathetic and helpful, which gives me great confidence that I'll eventually be able to see may way through this setback one way or another. In the meantime, though, it's a big, big delay for a project that was only just starting to really get off the ground.

In the meantime, well...let's just say I'm giving that moaning chair a real workout.

Special Delivery...

"You're good!" I shout, as Dad's license plate folds up between the trailer and the driveway.

It's been a busy few weeks. The wood arrived at its destination -my backyard- at the end of July. Dad drove down from Maryland with the load still strapped to his trailer, and I was waiting with my friends Ian and Selwyn to help me unload. Together, the four of us unloaded the timbers with a combination of block and tackle, rollers, inclined wooden planks, and a LOT of muscle:

"Heave!"

"Everybody watch your fingers!"

Unloading most of the "smaller" backbone pieces -the stem and stem knees, deadwood, stern knees and sternpost- was a difficult job, but one quite within the realm of possibility for four guys, as long as we didn't mind losing about a gallon of sweat in the process (this wood is heavy). The 6-inch by 18-inch by 25-foot long keel timber, however, was another story entirely.

Initially, we thought that we might be able to simply drag it straight off the back of the trailer by lashing it to the utility shed at the corner of the yard. We were forced to abandon that idea, however, when it became clear that the shed was more likely to move than the timber was - provided that it wasn't first crushed into an hourglass shape by the restraining cable! 

"We're going to need a bigger shed..."

Our second attempt involved placing metal rollers beneath the keel, and placing Selwyn in the bed of the pickup to provide the tension necessary to stop it from rolling uncontrolledly off the back as Dad hit the accellerator.

"Tight enough to keep it under control, but not so tight that it pulls you out after it!"

This cunning plan might have worked, but for the fact that the two-wheel drive truck was unable to obtain sufficient traction on the sloped wet grass of the back yard, and instead merely dug itself into a pair of begrimed divots beneath its rear wheels. Enter: Jenny the Jetta!

"I think I can! I think I can!"

With a heavy-duty tow line connecting the winch on Dad's massive Cummins diesel to the trailer hitch on my trusty little TDI wagon, the two of us counted down, and at Dad's signal we both gunned it, my squealing tires sending clouds of smoke billowing forth from the concrete of the driveway. It took two or three tries to get the timing right, but eventually Jenny's 90 extra horsepower proved to be enough to make the difference.

With the truck back on level ground and the keel teetering partway off the trailer, getting it the rest of the way became a simple matter of driving out from underneath - just as we'd originally hoped a few exhausting hours previously.

"So now there's this big hunk of wood in the back yard..."

Shortly after the work was completed, we were hit with a late afternoon sunshower, followed by a beautiful double rainbow over the neighborhood. If that's not a good omen, I don't know what is.

So now that that's out of the way, all I have to do is build the thing!

"Be Undaunted..."

We have the backbone timbers. After a week spent negotiating dates with the good people at Gannon & Benjamin, I arrived at my dad's house this past Sunday morning, where he was waiting with a big blue trailer hooked up to his green Dodge pickup. A moment or two later, after transferring my stuff to his vehicle, we were off - cruising North past the rolling hills of Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, then gradually shifting our course to the east, crossing the Hudson just north of New York City. Rolling through Connecticut, we sped past a nearly continuous traffic jam of vacationers in the westbound lanes heading back to New York from their Fourth of July weekends at the seashore. Later, we paused for dinner at an Applebee's whose walls informed us that we had stopped in Attleboro, Massachusetts - a name that sounded vaguely familiar to me for some reason.

After a beer and a half, it finally dawned on me that this must be the same town that my grandmother had once talked about spending her summers in as a teenager in the late 1920s. So that was kind of cool, even if all I did was grab dinner at a chain restaurant.

From Attleboro, it was just a quick ride up I-95 to my cousin Coral's house in Sharon, where she, her husband Henry, and their precocious troop of kids welcomed us in for the night. The kids in particular were interested in hearing about the details of our esoteric quest - especially once I unrolled the plans and described how the boat would be put together. Later, I'm pretty sure we four adults attempted to explain the concept of water displacement to an increasingly bored audience. Oh well.

The next day dad and I got up at 6:30 (some vacation day!) and after a quick breakfast, headed down I-495 to the Cautaumet Sawmill in Falmouth, where we waited for Ross to arrive from Martha's Vineyard. After a few minutes, he pulled up in a white truck with a steel frame that allowed for the transportation of large pieces of wood on top of the vehicle - quite a useful configuration if every delivery involves a trip on the ferry! Excitedly, I walked around to the back of the truck to take a look. There were the timbers, their ends painted with red lead:

A short time later, Tom from the sawmill retrieved a forklift and we began transferring the timber over to Dad's trailer:

Ross directs the loading of the Keel timber. It looked a lot bigger in person than in the pictures.

My first impressions of the lumber were overwhelmingly positive. This stuff is beautiful; I've never seen such a massive piece of wood be so straight-grained and knot-free. The keel timber almost looks more like a slab of metal or extruded plastic than wood:

It's also hard as granite; I tried scratching it with my fingernail, and barely made a mark. The comparison to granite may be rather appropriate, in fact; one unique characteristic of Angelique is its ability to incorporate large amounts silica into its cellular structure. This makes it heavy, but also unbelievably strong, and extremely hard on cutting tools. I foresee a lot of blade sharpening in my future.

While we were loading the rest of the timbers, I briefly mentioned to Ross that I would eventually need another large piece for the foregripe - the structural member that connects the stem to the keel. Overhearing this, Tom mentioned that he may have such a timber in the back corner of his lot, where it had been sitting for over ten years, so after we finished loading my order onto Dad's trailer he, Ross, and I followed Tom back to the edge of the lot where an enormous 12x12 of Angelique lay partially overgrown, and still sporting the marks of the sawyers who'd hand-hewn it from a single log back in the Guyanese jungle:

A few quick scrapes with a knife confirmed that under its weathered exterior, the wood beneath was well-preserved:

A look at the ends of this piece did make me a little nervous about the potential for ring shakes, but that's a question I'll have to pose to people considerably more experienced than I am - I think I might know just enough to scare myself! Returning to the truck, Dad fueled the truck and made sure that all the pieces were properly tied down while I settled accounts with Tom and Ross, then the two of us hit the road headed for home.

As we lumbered down the highway at sixty miles per hour, I stared out the rear window at the impressively massive load that we were pulling, began to feel more than a little like I was in over my head. I'd just made the single largest non-essential purchase in my life, and it was a bunch of wood. Excellent wood, to be sure, but that fact only added to my trepidation, as I imagined my inexperienced self taking a circular saw to those long, clear pieces and inadvertently rendering one or more of them completely unusable. They were hard enough even to move around - and I didn't have a forklift! How on earth was I supposed to build something out of them if I couldn't even move them? The presence of those massive timbers - now my massive timbers, threw the enormity of the task before me into stark relief. I felt daunted.

I started to express these thoughts to Dad, but was quickly cut off by his shout of "Oh my God, look what's behind us!"I turned quickly, terrified that my newly acquired timbers were about to be splintered by a collision with something even more massive. Instead, I saw this:

For the next few minutes, my dire thoughts were nowhere to be found, as we kept pace with the DeLorean while the two of us took turns reciting quotes from Back to the Future. When we were done,  I shouted a request of my own in the direction of the vehicular movie icon as it receded into the distance in front of us: "Can I jump in and take a ride to the time when I'm finished with this project?!?"

The rest of the drive passed largely uneventfully, and we made it back to Maryland in time for dinner with Brooke at Dad's place. The final leg of the wood's journey to the construction site will take place next weekend, when he'll haul it down to my back yard, where we'll take a considerably longer time unloading it using hydraulic jacks and block-and-tackle rather than a forklift.

After dinner, as I was loading up my car to return to Alexandria, Dad came over to the window of my car and, referencing my earlier anxiety over what I'd gotten myself into, gave me a final parting thought: "Be undaunted".

I will be.

S*%t just got real...

This is a picture of the wood I ordered for my backbone timbers, fresh off the sawmill track in Suriname, and ready to be packed into a container and shipped up to New England where Nat and Ross at the Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway will hold onto it until Dad and I can drive up there and take delivery.

The wood itself is Angelique - a species of hardwood so robust, and so resistant to rot and shipworm attack that at times I wonder whether it was engineered by aliens as an ideal boatbuilding material. Here are a few choice passages about the species from the U.S. Forest Service Products Laboratory (emphasis mine):

Angelique occurs only in French Guiana and Surinam...[Its strength] is superior to teak and white oak, when either green or air dry, in all properties except tension perpendicular to the grain, in which it is surpassed by both.  In tests made at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, the angelique samples sustained such small amounts of decay by even the most active fungus that it can be unqualifiedly classified for general consideration as very resistant.  

After 10 months’ exposure at Harbor Island, N.C., small specimens showed no evidence of marine borer activity and after 15 months only moderate attack by teredo and pholads. This performance surpassed that of teak, and under the same conditions white oak specimens were heavily attacked within 6 months. Edmondson reports angelique as showing no infestation by teredo and limnoria after an exposure of 3 years in Hawaiian waters. 

Tests indicate that angelique is superior to teak and white oak in resisting abrasion. Service trials on the landing decks of aircraft carriers show that angelique wears at least as well as teak under these rigorous conditions. New York Naval Shipyard, found that angelique holds wood screws at withdrawal loads about one-third greater than those of teak and white oak.

Pretty amazing stuff, right?

Anyway, I've just been notified that the container has cleared customs in Massachusetts, and should be ready for pickup in the very near future. I've also seen the invoice for the first time. I always knew that these major structural timbers would be one of the largest single expenses of the construction, but still...WOW. Let's just say that if I wasn't committed to finishing this project before, I sure am now!

Sawrendipity

In order to continue making progress on -and eventually finish- this project, some time ago I made a deal with myself that I would accomplish one task on it every single day. The task could be as large or as small as my time constraints allowed, I reasoned; as long as it was some kind of progress, it would count. This weekend, I had planned to fill my quota by continuing to transfer the lofted outlines of the backbone timbers onto plywood patterns -I've finished one so far, and started on another- however events quickly forced a change in this plan.

My stepmother, who lives in Maryland, is a realtor, and is friends with a couple who recently built their own house in Montgomery county. Having finished with that project, it seems that these individuals recently found themselves with a surplus of woodworking equipment that they no longer needed. Eager to free up some space, I'm told that they offered it "free to a good home", and Brooke, who clearly knows me far too well, claimed it for me without a second thought. What a score; I owe her BIG for this one.

And so it was, that while I was at work on Thursday, my dad drove down from Maryland, up the driveway, and across my back yard in his big diesel pickup, unloading from the bed a large Craftsman radial arm saw and a very neat old bandsaw. On the latter, an engraved metal plate informs me that spare parts can be obtained from any retail location of Sears, Roebuck, and Company – a brand which according to Wikipedia has not existed since the 1970s.

I haven't started the bandsaw up yet, but it looks like it ought to work. If it doesn't, I
hope I'll be able to jury-rig something, as I'm unsure of the response I would get
if I were to haul it down to my local Sears.

Faced with this serendipitous delivery of substantial shop equipment, my original plans to work on patterns this past weekend (with hand tools - HA!) went right out the window. It was imperative that these babies -the radial arm saw in particular- have a proper place to live. As such, the past two days were spent knocking together a half-decent workbench out of whatever materials I had on hand - which turned out to be quite a bit! Those of you who have visited my house may recognize in its shape the ghost of the loft bed that I once believed would make a welcome and space-saving addition to the guest room. Belatedly, I stand corrected. Its destiny clearly lay elsewhere.

So enough preliminary steps! Let's get to work!

The "Boatyard"

A view of where construction will occur, taken from near the future position of the bow. The stern will be located somewhere near the plastic shed. Two lean-tos are complete in this image; the third is under construction. 

No other problem has delayed the implementation of this project more than finding a suitable place in which to build the boat. When I first got the idea that this was something I wanted to do (over four years ago!) I initially had thought that construction would take place at my Dad's house in Maryland. At the time, that made sense to some degree, as there was plenty of space up there, as well as easy access to lots of tools, plus expertise from the family's resident boatbuilder extraordinare (for those of you who don't know him, Dad has done this before). Furthermore, I had little choice, as at the time I was renting a house whose topography, even in the extremely unlikely event that the landlord signed off on the project, would have turned the boat into an enormous 8-1/2 ton lawn ornament immediately upon completion. The place had a fully-fenced back yard immediately abutting a short and extremely steep hill in the front, with absolutely no hope of vehicular access whatsoever. That didn't stop it from serving as a boatyard of sorts -both my dinghy and kayak were finished there- but moving them into and out of the place was difficult at the best of times.

Dad's place had some disadvantages, however, particularly distance. It takes about an hour to get there if there's no traffic (a rarity on the DC beltway), which makes weeknight visits impractical. The distance also manifests itself in the cost of fuel to get there and back, and by making it more difficult to change plans on a whim. One finds oneself spending entire weekends there in the interest of getting the most work out of the fewest number of trips, at the expense of friends, other activities, etc. I tried to tell myself that that would be no big deal - that I could easily work on smaller sections of the project at my place, then trailer them up to the farm for final assembly, but the fact remained that a very large amount of time would have had to have been spent up there - particularly in the later stages of the project. In hindsight, I'm surprised that I held onto that notion as long as I did. Even after purchasing my current house in the fall of 2011, I spent six months designing a garage to fit at the end of the driveway, wherein, I was certain, patterns could be picked up and pieces shaped for eventual assembly elsewhere.

Concept drawing of one of three lean-to sheds under which tools and timber will be stored.

I don't remember there being any single moment when it "clicked" that this was not the best way to proceed; it was more of a gradual realization that took place throughout the summer of 2012. As I continued to work on lofting the boat's lines on my back deck, I came to appreciate the amount of progress that could be completed on weekday evenings, as long as the work site was located yards -instead of tens of miles- from my kitchen. Once I'd had that epiphany, however, I sprung into action. First, I inquired with the neighbors, who were all just fine with the idea. Next I called the county, asking whether there were any regulations pertaining to backyard boatbuilding. I could tell right away that this was not the kind of question they were used to fielding. After being put on hold for a while, and having my request escalated through what felt like several levels of supervisory responsibility, I finally was able to speak with someone who let me know that while there were no specific regulations prohibiting such a project, there were ordinances pertaining to the outdoor storage of construction materials that I should bear in mind. Given the amount of effort I intended to put into the project, I asked if I could have that in writing. To my surprise, they said that that would be no problem, as long as I e-mailed them with a formal request.

"Oh and by the way," my kindly local government official asked me over the phone, "about how big is this boat going to be?"

I gulped silently.

"Picture it like a big RV." I replied, sure I'd completely screwed myself. Two weeks later, however, I had a letter from the Zoning department granting my project explicit permission to go ahead. In its final sentence, the letter emphasized that while the county has no problem with boatbuilding, my HOA would probably have something to say about it. I smiled gleefully at this: I don't have one.

Following my positive encounter with the county, I built three small lean-tos (concept and construction pictured above) under which I intend to store timber and tools during the build. I'm also considering knocking together a couple of large rectangular wooden boxes in which to plant some bamboo, to screen the project so that it can't be seen from the sidewalk. Finally, I've contacted a professional boat-moving company, and asked them to assess the suitability of the site from a transport perspective. In hindsight, I probably should have done that before I built the lean-tos, but...well...I didn't. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I'll post about it when I do. In the meantime, here's a sample of the type of terrain they'll have to deal with:

The slight hill that the finished boat will have to climb in order to access the driveway and the street, taken from near the future location of the bow. Surely this will be no problem for a professional crew, right?

Appellations

So I've decided to create a blog. This is relevant because not long ago, I made the similar but rather more ambitious decision to build a boat. That project, the course of which this blog will document, is going to take a long time to finish, and I hope that by committing myself to some semblance of regular updates here, I can maintain the self-discipline necessary to see it through to completion. Once that happens - a day which seems vanishingly distant to me right now- maybe this will then transform into a cruising blog. For now and the foreseeable future, though, it's going to be a blog about boat construction, and an explanation of its title is in order. Before that, however, I ought to briefly introduce the boat that I'm attempting to build.

The thirty-foot falmouth cutter designed by Lyle Hess is a rugged offshore sailboat based on the ones that were used to deliver harbor pilots to waiting merchant vessels off the west coast of England during the age of sail. They needed to be able to operate year-round and in all weather conditions, and to lead the big ships into the harbor safely every time. Inspired by this design, Hess adapted it into a robust, heavy displacement ocean cruising yacht with ample beam and low freeboard. When famous circumnavigators Lin and Larry Pardey returned to California in search of a bigger boat, Hess knew just what hull to draw for them. Since then, the Pardeys have taken their Falmouth 30 across the world and around Cape Horn. Rolland Trowbridge sailed the Northwest Passage in one, along with his family of four. Randy Hanford, a shipwright from Baltimore, sailed his to French Polynesia. If ever there was a gorgeous boat fit to do some serious exploring, this is it.

Lin and Larry Pardey's Taleisin, class leader. (Image Credit: Nauticalmind.com)

Picking a name for something as significant and enduring as a yacht can be a long and time-consuming process, with names coming into and falling out of favor as their meanings and connotations are deliberated ad infinitum. As a space scientist and amateur astronomer, I wanted a name that brought to mind a celestial connection, but also one that simultaneously held a connection to ships and the sea. And of course, it had to sound pretty. 

Happily, I had just the one already picked out. I'd fallen in love with the name ever since middle school, when I'd first read about it as the constellation in which the homeworld of the Overlord race was located in Arthur C. Clarke's classic 1953 science fiction novel Childhood's End. Depicting the keel of Jason's ship Argo, the constellation Carina stretches across the southern hemisphere's skies between -50º and -75º declination. It is dominated by Canopus, the second-brightest star in the night sky, and by Eta Carinae, a cataclysmic variable four million times brighter than the sun, whose 1843 outburst briefly made it the brightest star of all. Sailing ships, awesome space stuff, and absolutely beautiful-sounding, Carina had it all. There was only one problem: there's another one out there.

Once I decided, after much deliberation, that this was the boat I wanted to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of my life realizing, I enthusiastically purchased the plans from Lyle's daughter. In between laying down the lines and sourcing materials for the project, I spent my evenings googling for anyone who'd built one before, so that I might find inspiration in their own interpretations of the Falmouth 30.

And then I saw it.

Jim Donovan was the same age as myself. Unlike me, however, by the summer of 2004 he'd already spent four years and 6,000 hours building a Falmouth 30 in a barn on Cape Cod. When he launched her, he embarked on a solo sail around the world, first to the Caribbean, then eventually making his way to Hawai'i on his trusty and capable…Carina. 

My heart sank. 

I re-checked the statistics on the boat. Was it possible that maybe he built the 32-foot version? Alas, it was true. This kid was my age, and was already out there living the same dream on the same boat -the exact same boat- with the same name. He and I even shared the same initials. If it had been a production fiberglass boat, this would've been OK; there are thousands of those. These beauties, however, are all hand-made, and according to Lin, only forty or so exist in the world. I had to face the facts; Carina was taken.

Jim Donovan's Carina, foreground, racing against a substantially larger schooner in the British Virgin Islands. How could this happen? (Image Credit: Swiftwing)

Despondent, I forged ahead. I made lists of every sea nymph and water sprite in the Greco-Roman pantheon. I pored over the names of every spacecraft and unmanned probe from Mercury through the Mars Rover. In recognition of my ancestral connection to the Royal Navy (which I may discuss in a later post), I laboriously scrolled through the names of every frigate and fourth-rate to ever slide down the Devonport slipway. I scanned the constellations for any other that possessed that rare combination of the celestial, maritime, and linguistic as Carina. 

Some came close. Vela, Carina's counterpart in the sky and the sails of the Argo made the shortlist, but it didn't quite sound right when spoken aloud. Aquarius, too, had a lot going for it, both as a constellation and the name of Apollo 13's life-saving lunar module, but as a zodiac constellation, it's become rather overused, and due to a certain musical, also has an unfortunate association with new-age astrological schlock.

And then I found Astraea. In classical mythology, Astraea presided over the Golden Age - the first, and most idyllic of the old Greek religion's deteriorating Ages of Man, during which, according to Aratus, she "dwelt on earth and met men face to face, nor ever disdained in olden time the tribes of men and women, but mingling with them took her seat, immortal though she was…Not yet in that age had men knowledge of hateful strife, or carping contention, or din of battle, but a simple life they lived." 

This age was followed by the silver and bronze ages, throughout which Astraea remained on Earth, but grew increasingly despondent over the increasing greed and violence of mankind. Finally, according to Ovid, the iron age arrived, and with it: 

The land that was once common to all, as the light of the sun is, and the air, was marked out, to its furthest boundaries, by wary surveyors. Not only did they demand the crops and the food the rich soil owed them, but they entered the bowels of the earth, and excavating brought up the wealth it had concealed in Stygian shade, wealth that incites men to crime. And now harmful iron appeared, and gold more harmful than iron. War came, whose struggles employ both, waving clashing arms with bloodstained hands…Piety was dead, and virgin Astraea, last of all the immortals to depart, herself abandoned the blood-drenched earth.

Fittingly for one whose name means "star maiden", upon fleeing to the heavens, she became the constellation Virgo, where she is visible to this day. According to Virgil's fourth eclogue, she will one day return to the Earth, bringing with her the rebirth of the golden age of her youth. 

Astronomically, the name is perfect; Virgo is a major constellation, and also contains the sky's largest Galaxy Cluster. Asteroid 5 Astraea is also a large main belt asteroid - and was historically significant in that with its discovery, asteroids were first recognized as a new class of objects, distinct from planets. Linguistically, Astraea's aesthetics compare favorably with Carina. I also like the motif of leaving behind the corruption and decadence of the Earth for a simpler, more virtuous existence elsewhere, which seems a fitting theme for a cruising boat. At first, the maritime connection did seem a bit lacking. Aside from being the name of a genus of star-shaped marine gastropods, she didn't seem to have much going for her. As I read more, however, I learned that due to her association with truth and justice, there have been a number of ships named HMS Astraea over the years, several of which began or ended their careers at Devonport, where my ancestors lived. 

HMS Astraea engaging the French warship Gloire off the Western Approaches, April 10th 1795

Also, the emblem of Asteroid 5 Astraea somewhat resembles an anchor:

So tentatively, Astraea is what I've decided to call her. It sounds good, it's astronomical, historical, and ship-related. As for this blog, Astraea Ascending refers to the fact that the boat itself will ascend (at least, a few feet) as its form takes shape, to the ascent of Astraea's celestial form in the spring, and to the hope that in the future my Astraea may, like her namesake, leave behind the crowded lands of men for a time, heralding peace and happiness whenever she once again makes land.