boat friends

Having boat friends is humbling. Fisher, Ben and Gina gave up what was an incredible weekend and a handful of weeknights to put in time doing dirty, tiring, hot scutwork on our boat. Saying "thanks" never seems to cut it but I'll say it anyways.

Thanks.











Work is progressing. But like everyone tells us, boat maintenance items have a funny way of presenting themselves. We ran across a few unplanned issues that took over the weekend. Still haven't gotten the bottom painted, try as we might. But the sunsets have been incredible so who can complain about that???





We found a void in the fiberglass on the bottom of the keel about 1 inch by 3 inches. From what we can tell, a rock must have hit the void on the delivery up from Mexico and broke it open. Thankfully, Fisher had just spent a bunch of time repairing a few blisters on his boat so he walked us through the repair. We exposed the fiberglass and ground out the void to a shallow indention. We painted a thin layer of West System epoxy and followed that with epoxy filler thickened with colloidal silica. We sanded that down this morning and will follow it up with a barrier coat and then a layer of ablative bottom paint.









We removed the prop and polished it. We're waiting to see if we need to replace one of the gears inside the MaxProp before we re-install.





Christy and Ben repaired the damage to the gelcoat on the starboard topsides.





We also did all sorts of work on de-naming the boat. Tradition says the old name cannot be found anywhere on the boat. Well as it turns out, the previous owner was a bit zealous about applying the name of his boat. On everything. Propane tanks. Jerry cans. Anchors. Base of the mast. Dinghy seats.







Speaking of thanks, Ben took all of these pictures. The guy does some incredible stuff with basically a point and shoot camera. Thanks Ben!! I re-hosted his pics on our smugmug gallery here but if you'd like to see them in the original Flickr format, go here.

47° 39' 33.62"N 122° 22' 14.04"W