Work to Date

Before quitting for the worst part of the winter we got a fair amount accomplished. In specific:

- Coamings, seats and hardware disassembled
- Seat boards sanded and stained
- Floorboards removed and sanded
- 85% of deck sanded and ready for painting

I have the material to build a new mast and boom and to build a bowsprit. These will be made out of cedar trees that have been peeled, dried, and varnished - I got them secondhand, and they'll need smoothing and re-varnishing, as well as hardware. I'll re-use as much of the original mast hardware as seems feasible, but I'll also need more blocks than I have available. Rope-stropped wood-shelled blocks would certainly look nice, and might prove to be a good indoors project.

I'm hoping to get started on the spars in the next week or two, but in the meantime I also have to build a steambox for the new cockpit coaming and prep the replacement frames. Things might not move too quickly, but at least I'll be busy.

Late Remarks

Here are a few pictures showing how she looked when I started the project in September:

Doesn't seem too bad from here.

Maybe a little weathered...

Yes, Perhaps

So she needs a little work - it's not like that's a surprise. After taking up the floorboards, benches, CB trunk cap, coamings and everything else we could get a screwdriver or a drill on, we realized what some of you must have been chuckling to yourselves about for a while now: refinishing a large wooden object is a shocking amount of work, especially when you start in September and want to get on the water before winter. Did I mention that it's easy to underestimate how much work there is? She wasn't even close to being ready by the time it got too cold and dark to work regularly outside. But progress has been made, and the new (more realistic) target is spring 2008.

One other thing I haven't mentioned: there are several frames that turned out to be completely shot - rotted all to pieces. and a couple of soft spots in the deck right up near the stem. Oh well. It could be worse, since replacing the bad part of the deck can be done the same time we add some structural members for the new bowsprit. Shame about the frames, though.

Backstory

Ok, so here it is:

The weekend of August 25th, 2007, I drove from Seattle to a suburb of Salem, Oregon, to look at the boat pictured below.This is an old photo. I had been shopping around for a small, secondhand sailboat for some time, and even though she was somewhat the worse for wear (and no longer looked like this), the price was right.

Anyhow, after some hemming and hawing and a typical string of hassles we got the boat home and started work. Or rather, started figuring out exactly what work needed to be done. According to Mark (the guy who sold her to me) she was built ~5 years ago, and the builder subsequently modified her by adding about 1.5' onto the stern, and - I assume - the short bowsprit you can see in the pictures. Mark didn't know the name of the designer or the design, but after some deductive reasoning and looking over a copy of the plans (xeroxed from some book) that he provided, I'm about 98% sure that she started out as a copy of Sharon Potts, by Edson I. Schock. Although not immediately of significance, this is interesting and a good thing to know. The obvious problems were the finish - everything needed to be sanded down and redone - and on a more detailed inspection the seat risers and some of the frames needed to be replaced. This was unfortunate. All told, and in no special order, here's what was on the preliminary list of things to do:

1) disassemble seats, floorboards, coamings, etc.
2) remove all hardware
3) clean up the interior
4) remove and replace rotten frames and floors
5) sand and prep interior
6) sand and prep deck and hull
7) fiberglass deck seams
8) final prep and paint hull, deck, and interior
9) rebuild seat risers
10) sand, prep, and paint or varnish, seats, floorboards, and coamings
11) sand and varnish mast and boom
12) reinstall hardware
13) reinstall seats, floorboards, coamings, and rubrail

Of course, this is somewhat simplified, and doesn't include any contingencies. In addition, I thought it might be fun to experiment with a different rig; so:

14) build new boom
15) build and install bowsprit
16) build new mast (?)
17) make or buy new sails

With all that in mind, we started making plans. This mostly consisted of discussing what we were going to do and buying sandpaper.