After two summers of building, Killyrover was launched on October 5, 2008.
It was a cold and damp afternoon with lots of grey clouds overhead, but there was a breeze and I was sick of waiting, so it was down to the local boat ramp on the local lake. After a short “ceremony” with my family (and an offering of rum poured on the bow), I pushed her off the trailer.
She launched easily and floated in a couple of inches of water. I was glad I had put those runners on the bottom as she bumped and scraped on the rocks. The runners have a strip of 1/4-inch aluminum on them, so the bottom never got a scratch.
The launching ramp was on a lee shore, but due to how the AF3 can float in such shallow water, with one good push and a quick hauling in of the sheet she was away.
As you can see in the pictures, the lee board didn’t go down. In the excitement of the launch I didn’t notice, and surprisingly, with a little speed on, she tacked back and forth anyway. I also didn’t have the sail’s boom and spar properly secured to the mast. Even so, the homemade, polytarp sail pulled her right along. When I dropped sail and tried to remedy these problems, I was quickly pinned against someone’s dock on the lee shore. I tried to get things straightened out as two summer’s worth of work banged up against the dock again and again. Finally, with a few fresh “dings’ in her new paint, I was able to get her sailing again. With the board down and the sail under a little better control, she really sailed well. By then I was starting to get chilled, so a few more tacks across the cove, then straight downwind right onto the paved ramp (thanks to those bottom runners again).
Total building time was 237 hours. Why so many hours? The main reason is that my life’s responsibilities made it so that I could seldom spend more than two or three hours at a time working on the boat. There were maybe four or five weekend days in the whole two summers it took to build that allowed for a five hour session. All other work sessions were usually between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Essentially, the entire boat was built two hours at a time.
Some may think the number of pictures posted on this site is overkill. Actually, I deleted a lot! The reason I’ve posted so many parts of the process is that when I was first starting building, I devoured anything I could find on the Internet about the AF3. I wished there had been more. When I decided to make this site, I tried to think about the next guy coming along who wanted to build an AF3. I hope the abundance of photos on this site will support and encourage the next builder.