By S/V Lealea | June 06, 2017 at 08:09 PM EDT |
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By The Skipper:
Making progress at last! Good weather, warmer at least, has allowed us to fit the main bulkhead and install the water tank, v-berth deck and divider panels in the forward cabin. The bunk is in and we could now sleep aboard if we had to. I have been working on the wiring. The new breaker panel came back from Clear Cut Plastics in Seattle so I am making a new backing plate and revising the wiring plan. I re-ran the wiring from the solar panels all the way aft, to the batteries under the main cabin sole.
That is where I ran into another project that couldn't wait any longer. The main cabin sole is a molded fiberglass pan that sits over the bilge. It has two hatches in it for access to the batteries and the original fuel tank that we are no longer using. Over the years, a crack developed beween the two hatches. The crack turned into a tear and has been getting worse due to our walking on it until it can no longer be ignored. Yesterday I took my grinder to it and ground away the surface glass, revealing a partial delamination of the pan which no doubt contributed to the crack. More grinding. Then I cut several pieces of glass cloth, mixed up some resin, wetted out the surface and laid on five or six layers of 6oz glass cloth. I placed one layer on the underside of the pan, then starting with small pieces, filling in the hole and gradually increasing in size (What a mess!).
Today I went back to sand it smooth in preparation for painting but the resin had not quite cured completely and gummed up my sanding disc. Daytime high temperatures here have been in the low fifties and the resin requires 24 hours at 70 degrees so I decided to wait until it is completely cured and hardened.
Today is grocery day so I went shopping. Warmer today but still below 70 this afternoon. I guess I'll wait until tomorrow to get back to finishing that repair. Since anything else we do requires walking on that deck repair prudence dictates that we find something else productive to do, off the boat for the rest of the afternoon.
Did I mention that we have finally, after much urging from our friends and YouTube subscribers, opened a Patreon account? We will continue to upload free to everyone YouTube videos, but we have been working on something special that we are releasing only to patrons who support us on Patreon. We hope this new effort will help get us past the expense of the refit and on to new horizons. and we hope you will support us with a small pledge to access this exclusive content
Mahalo nui,
Chuck Rose
