Steps forward

We came back from the boat a little early last weekend to get another couple of coats of clear on the table. Monday morning a planned nine straight days of traveling started for me, so all boat project progress came to a halt. Seeing as I am spending several long days in places I don't really want to be however, Spanish lesson progress is proceeding nicely. (Which isn't to suggest I can actually speak Spanish yet.)

Table project efforts are still focused around the shop in the city, but that doesn't mean Kintala herself is being ignored. A few weeks ago Deb noticed an ugly brown stain oozing out from under the starboard side staysail winch. Ugly brown tracks on Kintala usually mean core material, and so it proved. What ever bedding might have been under the winch at some point in the distant past has long since shriveled away to nothing. We also discovered that the winch was mounted over plywood core; or rather what is left of the core after years of being soaked in water. So a little repair work is in order. It is also clear that the winch itself has seen no routine maintenance in - oh, I don' know - a decade or so?

Add to the list, rebed and service all four cockpit winches.

We also took another swing at resetting the main hatch lexan in the frame using a different kind of sealer, Dow Corning 795. Though I had many bad things to say about how porly the black 4200 we tried last time did it the adhesion department, the fact is it stuck to the frame like it was welded on. It just didn't stick to the lexan at all. We roughed up the edge of the glass with some 50 grit this time around and I am cautiously optimistic that we might be closing in on finishing up the hatch project some one and a half years after we started it. (Getting the 4200 off the frame was ... difficult.)

The hatch went back on just before the start of the greet-the-new-newlyweds party for Emily and Joel. It was a pretty good party (of course) with counters full of food and the gathering of good friends after a long winter apart. Lots of boat work was finished up just in time for the festivities and the parking lot was a full symphony of buffers, grinders, and power washers right up until dinner was served. I must have been working a little harder than I thought throughout the day though. Long before the party was even running at full steam I was spotted streatched across the corner couch, nodding off. A long day of work in the warm sunshine, good food, a bottle of chilled "Blue Moon"... I was lucky I lasted as long as I did. Leaving the serious work of celibrating to the younger and more practiced I headed off to the V-berth and slept like the dead.