Fish and I are finally making some visible progress on the sailboat.
Shortly after my last posting (in April!), we started in on the boat. We were motivated by the fact that we uncovered it to show it to Kat when she visited. On April 18th, which happens to be my wedding anniversary, we spent the afternoon cutting out the bad repair made by the previous owner after he bashed the starboard bow against a piling. We also took apart the tiller assembly and prepping the broken fiberglass around the rudder post for repairs. Fast forward about a month, and we've finished laying fiberglass into the void left when we cut out the bad patch (there was a delay in there while we gathered a lot of fiberglass materials and supplies, and waited for May Showers to let up long enough to lay glass). Still, by the end of May everything was looking good for finishing the exterior repairs and getting prepped for paint. Mother Nature had other plans.
A quick look at the
local weather records for June will show you that we had rain, rain, and more rain. Not exactly what you're looking for when you're doing exterior fiberglass and painting. We made due with finishing odd jobs that could be done in the garage -- mostly bits of hardware and some carpentry. I knocked together a cabinet for all our fuses and wiring. We also spent a lot of quality time pumping out the bilge, which seemed to fill up every time we turned around.
Then came July, and with it a ten-day trip to England for Lemur and me (about which more later). Now it's the end of July, and I'm pleased to report that Fish and I have actually made good progress in the past couple of weeks. We patched the inboard edge of the starboard bow repair, tabbing it into the deck for strength and watertightness. We patched the interior cabin wall that we accidentally cut out when cutting out the bad repair. We mounted hardware and some sturdy braces to the companionway hatch (though I still need to install the actual lock).
Last week, wonder of wonders, we actually got the bottom painted. Two coats of epoxy primer on Saturday, and a third coat of primer and two coats of copper-based anti-fouling paint on Sunday. On Monday, we put the bunks back on the trailer and took down the temporary braces we'd been using while we did the bottom. We patched the broken fiberglass around the tiller fitting, polished up the tiller hardware, and reassembled the whole works (a really ugly chore that involved Fish spending a lot of time crammed into the aft hold). Thursday, we did a few little repairs on the transom and prepped for topside painting. This afternoon, we put on a coat of primer, and the first coat of color.
Finally, after a year of working, watching, and waiting, the Red Mantis is the proper color. We'll add a couple more coats in the next few days, along with replacing some rigging hardware with new stuff that Fish picked up yesterday. I need to make some phone calls to our helpers, but there's a distinct possibility that we'll be on the water on the 8th, and failing that, it's almost a certainty that we'll launch on the 14th.
I'm so excited, I could pee!
Photos & captions:
April and May;
July