If it rains during the night I usually start off the day wiping off leftover drops off the cap rails and waterways. It keeps the varnish from spotting and some say the droplets are actually like little lenses that can burn the varnish in the direct harsh sunlight of the Caribbean. I don't think the optics are quite right, but I will wipe them off just the same (I'll have to study that more). Since it rains every night I've been real busy in the mornings. It really started to piss me off one morning when it rained again right after I wiped the whole boat down... twice. Then it cleared up blue sky and everything(grrrrr...). The weather out here is tricky. That's why the forecast is typically around 50%. You have to read this as "It may rain, or not. We really don't know".
Otherwise- I've been hanging around alot... literally. It was time to take on the spars project. The big sticks in the middle of the boat that point skyward. When Astor came through Antigua(back in April) they decided to strip the masts all the way down and start over. This hasn't been done since they first bought the boat 22 years ago and it was time. The masts are the only job they do not do themselves and hired a couple of locals to do the work. In my opinion they did mostly a mediocre job at best. In all fairness since they stripped all the way down to the wood, it kind of woke up the grain. There is alot of that to deal with as well as their rough start/stops with the brush. |
| Before |
It's not really obvious from a distance, but when you look close or run a hand over it -wow. I have been on the foremast for two days sanding down the brush strokes and runs and I am only about 2/3 the way down. In the pics I lightly sanded a section to pronounce the effect even more. Then I took a pic of a section after I've worked on it a bit. Now we have baby bottom smooooth. There are a few dings and battle scars in the wood that I can't get out and some of the grain is still a bit frisky but it's as good as it gets for now.
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| After |
After all this, then I get to transfer my climbing rig over and do the main (it's a bit taller). But hey, my office has a heck of a view!
3 comments:
Can you hook up some kind of umbrella protection to keep the fresh varnish from being rained on if the weather changes? It would be extremely annoying to have to start over from scratch because of the rain.
Good luck with that!!
I've been trying to figure that one out too. It's a tough one because the little mast might be 50 ft tall. It's best to do the varnish in one pass and there is usually a nice breeze coming through here. Any covering could maybe be bunched up at the top and pulled down as I go and hopefully not get into the sticky.
Oh yeah- I am basically in a limited resource environment. It's not like I have a Home Depot around the corner.
I'm in Oregon - the Land of Tarps. Everyone has at least 10, because you know you're going to need them eventually :P
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