It is nice to look at photos of boats and people working on them but that does not get the work done on ours! All of April, save for one weekend due to the flu, we worked on Restless. I cannot say that anything drastic happened compared to before I went gallivanting off across Europe other than now the boat will not sink when we put it in the water. We seem to be getting into the more mundane year to year maintenance which gives us hope that the boat will be in the water before June. But hope is dangerous and I don't trust it!
After we fit the planks, we had to caulk them. My dad, lucky enough, had some caulking cotton left over from a project and had no future plans to use it. He also let us borrow a caulking iron. After reading our gospel, The Boatwright's Companion: Repairs Below the Waterline, the saying 'lift and tuck- lift and tuck- lift and tuck' rang through my head. We also watched a really good video on how to caulk. I did all of the caulking as I felt that Ted would not have the tender touch to place the cotton into the seams and then the sudden 'THWACK' to get it in. When I was doing it the greek myth about the threads of life with Moirai sisters was replaying in my head; power can be an addicting substance.
I can honestly say that by the second plank I was getting into to it, but I think I need a bit more practice before I can be as fast as some of the people I watched! In the time I took to caulk two planks, professionals can do half a boat!
The pattern that you make with the cotton reminded me of my Raggedy Ann dolls hair
It is very important that you smell the cotton before using it. It will rot if it gets wet before you whack it into place.
This is not a a caulking mallet. I nearly finished the first plank with this one. Once I got my hands on a real one it made a world of difference! There is a lot more weight behind a proper caulking mallet. My thumb can tell you call about it.
This is not all the way in, I pushed a lot more of that further in.
This was clearly our artsy photo shoot! The lighting was perfect
Finding a comfortable position to do this was a bit challenging. I set up various buckets to sit on and when I could I would lean against the trailer.
In this photo you can see my attempt at keeping the cotton clean as well as the actual caulking mallet laying on top of my bucket with several pieces of wood for the perfect height.
I did have fun doing this! This is right before I THWACKED all that in
All caulked and ready from some plugs!
Ted made and put in most of the plugs. (One of our smaller caulking mallets in on the trailer)
Ted and I have been talking about a garboard plug since the boat became Restless. Last year I noticed that she had the fitting for one and then this year I found the hole on the inside. So Ted did some exploring and we found we had a plug! Someone had put filler on top of it and it appears to be a stripped slot head screw head... great... But it is a start, we will try to take what ever plug is in there out, but if that doesn't work we will take the entire fitting out and get a new one. We have a 50/50 shot in my opinion!
You can hardly tell which one is the new plank...right? We will be sanding the bottom soon and painting so I hope you wont be able to tell!
We got a coat of varnish on this past weekend. It was nice to spend sometime on deck and we had a very nice weekend to do it.
We are certainly in a different place than last year. We don't have to deal with a baby blue deck and the boat is looking really good. We are feeling the pressure now because the weather has been so nice and we don't want to let her dry out. But it can never be as bad as last year when we were running Henry the heater full time and lights below. The boat has also not made me cry yet, but we still have some work to do so I say I still have a 50/50 shot!
