This area:
Although we are given a lot of information from the table of offsets, we are constantly referring back to the drawings to scale off measurements that aren't included in the table, and to see if the curves we come up with just feel right.
Here you can see the shape of the rudder as well as the long, sloping underside of the boat. You are looking at the boat from the stern here.
That large, thick batten is being used to draw out a long straight run of the keel where it joins the top of the lead ballast. Things can kind of get piled on top of one another when more than one person is working on a lofting.
Here's another view of the very curvy rudder and next to the straight sternpost.
One of the sternpost lines (the straight lines angling down from left to right) was wrong, by the way. We just haven't painted over it yet.
Here's the underside of the bow, looking aft.
Yep, that wiggle is supposed to be there. Since it scoops in a bit right at the water line, our guess is that Olin was trying to shorten the waterline a bit to comply with one of the class rules.
After the profile is done, we start on laying down the water lines.
For folks not familiar with lofting, it can seem like a real jumble. We're piling multiple views of the boat from multiple perspectives all on top of one another. When you work on one of these things for a while, however, the lines just naturally start to sort themselves out.
The water lines that we are laying out are slices of the boat side to side and front to back. It's the same way a lumberjack slices a tree when he cuts it down. If you took the water line of a standing tree, it would be a circle, more or less. And if the tree was perfectly round, you could get by with only showing half the width of the tree, so it would be a half circle.
Here's the first water line being laid out.
Now here's where it can get tricky. The straight lines you see going away from you in this picture are water lines in the profile view. If you looked at the cut line on a stump from the side, it would be a straight line just like this. At the same time, the long curved batten is also a water line, except this time seen from the top of the boat. This is the curved line you'd see if you looked at the stump from the top (providing of course that you just cut down a boat-shaped tree).
Putting all these lines on top of one another is actually very practical. We can quickly move from perspective to perspective this way. If we have to shift a batten to make something fair, we can easily see how that change will affect a different view of the same part. As we tweak the long water line up or down a little bit, we check to see how this affects the shape of the body plan where we applied the tweak.
The process is one of constant back and forth communication between people looking at the different views. A typical exchange might sound like:
"Station 8 looks flat, I want to give it 3/16"
"Lemmie see... I can't do 3/16, I can do an eighth."
"I'll take the eighth, but I want to let station 7 & 9 out a bit then too."
"Ok, that puts me closer to my marks if you do 7, but leave 9 alone for right now."
Ernest Hemmingway's got nothing on us. Laugher, tears, drama, cliffhanger endings, we got it all.