Latest conversations with interested family, for now unnamed, have suggested that the skiff will simply serve as a warm-up for building the tender and should be completed within the first month! And also, my carpenter/cabinetmaker friend here in Annapolis upon pondering the length of the boat and the number of planks per side has suggested the skiff will take 140 hours, translating to one month approximately, also. I like to keep track of what all the knowledgeable men I know have to say about this project, being female, right brain, & a more artistic/intuitive type, and not so confident about making predictions. I'm much more conservative in terms of time estimates but feel it's a good idea to keep track of all these predictions so that when the real time arrives I can see where we measure up, or if we measure up.

Well, we may have found a compromise, and that would be to start by building the skiff, a much simpler boat to build as it's flat bottomed and has only two planks per side, and then when we see the end in sight we'll start the tender. The tender is a 14' lapstrake rowing boat, 9 planks per side if I remember correctly, and much more complex but challenging for that reason. Both are nice to look at and both will be built using traditional methods, materials, and tools.
Pictures and details will be posted soon when I'll connect to a web page. Contact me at hollace@crosslink.net

Right now Rick and I are discussing which boat to build, or whether we should try to build both the Trumpy Tender and the Mathis/Trumpy skiff. Since this will be a six month project I'm leaning in the direction of just the Mathis/Trumpy skiff, but Rick wants to build them simultaneously.