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.

All part of the deal

Deb and I picked up some kind of bug within hours of each other. Or maybe its something in the air, allergies or the stuff they are spraying across the river since the wind has shifted from that direction. It is like a bad cold or mild flu and, unfortunately, came to visit at the same time as getting the big hole in our foredeck closed seemed like a good idea, what with a tropical storm fixing to turn into a hurricane churning around out by the islands and all. It may just be a newbie thing, but being in this neck of the woods at this time of the year has made keeping an eye on the NOAA two and five day tropical forecasts my newest hobby. So far so good, the sea and wind gods have seen fit to take it easy on the Atlantic, apparently focusing instead in kicking the snot out of the Pacific this year.

Framing for the structural foam which you can see oozing out the left side.

So we have been pressing on with projects as best as we can, collapsing at night with the day's energy account severely overdrawn. Deb has been adding to the cruising kitty by doing canvas work for nearby boats. I have been depleting it at about the same rate getting materials for filling the void in the deck. It must be admitted that slinging glass in a FL summer, while enjoying alternating visits from a fever and the shakes, is a new experience for me. One I can't say I'm enjoying much, but today saw the deck closed for the last time. All that remains is the non-skid repair, something I put in the "cosmetic" category. No less important, just less pressing.

Foam core in place.

In the end the smaller voids ended up being filled with a combination of stuffed glass mat in one corner, two part structural foam in the other two corners. The main core repair was done with a high density foam mat that looks a bit like a chess board, overlaid with bi-axial glass, filled as required, with the original deck glassed back in place. So yes Mr. Sailboat expert, I fear this bit of Kintala's foredeck has at least four different kinds of core material. If the bow ever twists off and falls to the bottom of the sea I'll be sure to put it in the blog. It must be said though, that part of the deck is now as hard as sin. No more sinking feeling when going forward and, no matter what, much better than it was.

Deck glassed back in place but pre-grinding. You can see why we need to replace the non-skid. It's old and in bad shape.

Two other boats in the marina are undergoing similar repairs, the one next door being done by my new friend Dennis (of slinging glass at The Bear fame) at the same time I am attending to Kintala. We have been helping each other along figuring out the best way to approach two similar, but still different, repairs. His problem was forward of the mast and the core is plywood, not end grain like Kintala. Making an assault on the ugly from the side was impossible. His only approach was to cut away the deck until finding solid core. Once the underlying repair was completed, piecing the top deck bits back together and making it all fit right would have taken days. Instead he is just going to glass over the new core making, in essence, a new top layer to the deck composite. I, on the other hand, could dig the rotted core out from between the layers of glass, stuff it full one way or the other, and put the original top deck back in place. Two different ways, both getting the job done. He put the final layer of filler in his repair today, grinding, gel coat and non-skid tomorrow. I stitched the seam in my deck plug with glass today, filled and ground the repair. Gel coat and non-skid tomorrow as well. It is kind of fun having the repairs going on at the same time, the cold beer we share at the end of the day in Kintala's cockpit feels well earned.

Post-grinding and waiting for the non-skid

There are several more big projects to go. Sometimes I get a bit discouraged. Deb and I used to talk about what we were going to do with the boat next, where we were going to go, what we might see when we got there. Now we talk about what we are going to do to the boat next and how much it is going to cost. We wonder if we are ever going to get off this dock, and how that might be managed. Another friend from this year's cruise has thrown in the towel, the boat up for sale. Breakdowns, stranded in the Islands for months, bad weather, nights of being afraid, and a relentless loneliness not being the kind of life desired.

The seam for the anchor locker is going to be glassed in as well.
It's glassed below but not above deck so water went into the core.

I understand completely, but still can't envision Deb and I living any other way. Just the thought of having to get a regular job, going to an office, needing a car, meeting someone else's schedule, all the while just waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me yet again by some change in Board or Management politics, gives me a headache. Living and cruising on a boat on a fixed or very modest income is often a hard way to live. Anyone who suggest otherwise simply hasn't done it. But grinding out the hours needed to get to a paycheck isn't always a walk in the park either.

Everything gets easier if one can throw large chunks of money at whatever problems arise, and that is true on land or on the water. For Deb and I, and it seems for many we have met "out here", it was a choice to make a go of a different kind of living, one where big chunks of money are not likely to be part of the equation. For others "out here" big chunks of money were never going to be part of the equation, and living on the water offered a chance to live better than living modest on land.

The cruising mags seem geared to those retiring well and going cruising. Good for those who pull it off. For the rest of us though, going cruising means living modest. And living modest sometimes means that problems take a little more effort to climb over.

All part of the deal.

Just a reminder why wer're doing this...

Focus

It may be that nothing will focus a sailor's attention more than chopping a giant hole in the deck of his or her boat.  Even when the hole is about as far above the water line as it is possible to be, cranking up the saw and slicing through the fiberglass that carries the load of the fore deck and separates one from the elements seems a drastic kind of thing.

With The Floating Bear floating peacefully on her mooring ball in Dinner Key, and a day or two of not doing much of anything at all, it is time to turn some attention to Kintala and her own project list. At the top of that list is the soft spot not far aft of her bow, favoring the port side, and encroaching on the cleat.  It has been there since we bought the boat and reminded me of a task that needed done every time I went forward to attend to dropping or pulling the hook.  Time to take a deep breath and crank up  the cutter.

Hammer taps outlined the area of ugly needing to be uncovered, though thought was given to the finished product.  The soft spot spans two sections of non-skid across a band of gel-coat.  The call was to make the cut inside one section of non-skid and assault some of the bad core, as it were, from the side. I like the idea of chopping in such a way as to save the top piece for later, glassing it back down on the new core to complete the repair.  This requires not butchering it up when slicing it out and easing it off of the core.

By the way, assaulting the bad core from the side is not in the books anywhere, at least not in any of the sailboat repair books I could find.  According to the sailboat experts solid, un-compromised core has to be exposed in order to do a good repair.  Since I have long lost faith in sailboat experts, some of this is getting made up as we go.

Anyway, tape lines laid down, the saw went to work.  The trick is to cut deep enough to free the top layer but not deep enough to cut the bottom layer of the composite deck.  (Or, in this case, deep enough to cut through the interior and open the V-berth to the sky.)  It isn't nearly as hard to do as it sounds. There is a clear difference in feel when the blade slices through hard fiberglass into mushy wood. Once the cut was complete the task was to ease the top layer off without breaking it into several useless pieces.

The trick to that is to use a multitude of prying tools; screwdrivers, putty knives, picks, hacksaw blades, whatever works to separate the glass from the wood.  Throw in a ton of patience.  When something starts to crack, stop and take a different approach.  It took more than an hour of being careful, but the top layer of deck came away as clean as could  have been hoped.

The ugly lay underneath, exactly as expected.  Water actually ran along the putty knives, screwdrivers and, eventually, vacuum cleaner attachment, as the work went on.  Rotten wood covered a good bit of the fore deck before it was over.  Eventually most of the evil core was gone and a DA sander went to work, smoothing out the top of the bottom layer of composite and the bottom of the top layer.  So long as the sun was baking the repair it was left exposed to dry out.  It gets covered at night in case of rain, but for the next day or two it will be left opened to dry.

That will give me time to plan the sideways attack on the bad core.  There are several options. Latest and greatest would be to fill the undercut deck with structural foam.  I worked with the stuff years ago while building experimental radar jamming drones to be launched from Nuke attack B-52's whose purpose was to give the Ruskies too many radar hits to shoot at.  Once mixed it swells up like the Blob of horror picture shows then dries sin hard. But it isn't cheap and getting it in the right place at the right time can be a challenge.

Old school would be to make this part of the fore deck a solid laminate using glass mat and resin, stuffing the voids using any tools that work.  Middle school would be to mix up some resin and thicken it with silicon to fill the voids.  The concern with both of these is, given the angles and areas involved, getting a solid fill. I'll have to think on this one a bit.

All in all though, the focus is back on Kintala and getting her ready to  go cruising again.  And that is a good kind of focus.