Strolling past the finish line …

Many boat projects are finished late at night after an impossible day of taking a beating. The job is “almost” done as the afternoon wears thin. Putting the final touches on it this day instead of tomorrow becomes a bit of an obsession all by itself. At other times there are compelling reasons to finish the job, like incoming weather that will make the current resting place miserable or even dangerous. Or it might be a cruising permit or visa is running out and Officialdom is demanding one vacate their waters ASAP. We have heard tales of boats needing to get out of FL or face a killer sales tax bill.

Kintala faces an impending need to get along herself. At the end of this month the dock fees around here go from simple larceny to grand theft boat in anticipation of all you rich yacht owners scurrying away from the cold. In spite of that impending assault yours truly didn't work that hard today. And yet I still managed to put the finishing touches on two projects.

The first will mark me as one of the deeply disturbed boat owners in the world, and all are free to guffaw at my weenieness. The board to keep the water and fuel jugs on deck, a near universal trapping on a true cruising boat, was a quick and dirty install made just before we pulled out of Oak Harbor. Raw wood, sharp edges, and the forward lower corner kept catching the port jib sheet during a tack, adding one more stumbling point to getting Kintala's bow through the wind. It was also ugly as dirt and about the same color. Since it had to be removed to dull the edges and get rid of the offending corner, a few hours spent sealing it up with a couple of coats of varnish didn't seem that extravagant a use of time. (That, it turned out, was a minority opinion.)  In any case it was re-installed yesterday with the last coat of varnish still a bit tacky. After cooking in the sun all day today the finish was hard as nails, so the straps went through the slots, the height was adjusted to catch the jugs just right, and everything is back in place. And really, as a finish job it is a “10”. That is, it looks okay from about ten feet away. It isn't like there are 5 coats of hand rubbed clear on the thing. I'm not that big a weenie.

Oh how bad the rest of the non-skid now looks...

The other job put in the finished column today was the deck repair. It still remains to be seen how the stuff will wear, but the initial take on KiWi Grip is that this stuff is The Bomb! Deb mixed up a batch colored to match the deck. (She used to color match the paint that went on million dollar + corporate jets. It is a rare talent. There are few as good as she and none better.) A few strips of tape, some extra KiWi Grip layered where the new fiberglass seam now lay, an open “stipple roller” carefully applied and, like magic, the repair nearly disappeared. There is one small whoopee in the deck where fractured glass gave way to expanding foam, but one needs to look for it.  Other than that it is hard to tell there was a big hole there just a few days ago.

It isn't every day that two jobs get finished while the sun is still high in the sky.

Cheers.