Keel closed, holidays over

By now the keel is closed too. That means the bow, the midships section and the keel are done on the port side, and only the sternpost remains to be worked out. Things will probably slow down considerably now, because the holidays are over. But for the time being the plates will keep me out of mischief.

Piet thought the plates were on nice and tight, but quietly wondered why I had changed pattern halfway. That was a slip in my thinking. At the stealer I started in such a way that I came out exactly right between the two belts that the first stealer went in between. As a result, from that point on I suddenly stagger the wrong way. Not so clever in hindsight, of course, but I am not going to fix it. It is too little noticeable for that, and Hans said it before: if I do not tell anyone, nobody will see it. What I take from it for the starboard side is that a stealer determines the stagger of the pattern for everything that comes after it, so I need to think that through beforehand rather than once the plates are on.