Back to warm weather

Last week. I thought I was ready to apply the fiberglass cloth to the bottom of the boat, but it was just too cold and promises to stay that way for quite awhile. I returned the boat to its upright position and have gone back to work on fittings rather than filling holes with epoxy. Felt so good to be making progress that felt like progress. I will continue to putter away on the boat and may get the decking on before it goes upside down again. That may make it more difficult to invert as it will have to sit on a curved deck. Hmmmm
In any case, I have the back compartment all painted and the rudder fittings are in place. I now have started making the upper watertight compartments in the stern area. Hard to explain, so I shall refer back to the pictures at the top. The rudder lines run through the center 'box'. The compartments on each side of the rudder line tunnel will be storage at the front and buoyancy at the rear. Cool eh?

The skeg is on!

Yesterday I went out to the boat and to my dismay, found that the car port roof still had snow on it. The moist air condensed on its underside then rained down on the boat and everything else around it. This morning, the ceiling was dry and the boat felt dry too. To be sure, I put a heat lamp along the path of the new skeg and warmed it up. Didn't change colour nor give off any steam, so I figured I was good to go ahead.
I was very nervous about putting on the skeg as it developed a bend or two once I cut it out. I could correct for the vertical bends, but the lateral ones concern me. From underneath, I drilled through on the center-line I made when I started the project. One hole at each end of where the skeg would live. I temporarily screwed the ends down then I ran a string line along the 'top' of the skeg. I tacked little blocks to the hull to keep the skeg nice and straight. This morning, I slathered epoxy on the mating faces of the skeg and hull, placed the skeg back between the blocks and screwed it down. The stringline showed it was still straight, so I laid down some epoxy fillets in the angles between skeg and hull. When that was done, I put some mini fillets on the laps of the planks. Nearly ready for fiberglas cloth and epoxy on the bottom sections of the hull. My next nervous job!

Back on the Job

The past two weeks have been very cold and snowy in Campbell River, so I have not been able to do a lot of work on the boat. Too cold for the epoxy to set and too snowy to uncover the boat. While I was on my break, I turned the boat upside down and worked on small parts that were able to be epoxied then brought into the house to set. I also dared, on the milder days, to try filling some of the five hundred screw holes with epoxy paste. Those fillings took two days to finally set, rather than the usual overnight. The pictures with this entry show the inverted boat as well as the rudder, dagger board and the rudder stock displayed on top of the hull.