I conducted a stress test on the top fronds that's been glued down. When I stepped on them, they stayed in place. That was a very good sign that the boat can handle weight of about 100+ pounds placed on it. The boat is far from uniform, but I'm working on taming the fronds to lay the way they need to lay. Once all the biters underneath the top fronds are covered completely, I can start contouring the top layer of fronds to make the deck more uniform. Now that I have a sense of what working with fronds as a building material is like, I'm going to do things differently in the next project. Some experiments I done on this boat, I won't do when building the next one. It's always better to work with precise measurement when constructing anything. Even if it's very primitive by today's standards. My original plan was to make a boat like the Ancient Egyptian papyrus reed boats that didn't take a year to build. Those boats were made from soft material something close to thick straw. Fronds are made of a soft wood. Some of them can be quite hard, which really makes them an ideal material for building small vessels. I have to say that I can start preparing the boat for it's test launch in the next couple of months. That is after the deck is completed and I add navigator's seat on it. I still have to figure out how I'm going to mount the pedal mechanism and rudder on the boat.
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