Sustainable Sailing

A very stormy last night. The forecast said we were going to get gusts of 52mph (Force 9) and we can believe it. No damage but it was shaking the boat a bit and very loud.

Slightly calmer this morning with gusts in the 40’s (mph) but sunny and warm.

Once we got started it has been a full on, long morning.

First, I used the grinder with a 40 grit flappy sanding disc (I’m confident that isn’t the right name) to clean up the outside of all the holes we filled on Tuesday. Making sure there were no voids and that everything was clear of plastic. Then we washed all the dust off them.

Next a really thick mix of epoxy with wood flour to fill the deeper bits (where there had been a fold in the plastic that had held it in for example).

Then a frantic time, not helped by the wind. Jane was mixing the epoxy and cutting circles out of fibreglass cloth. I was using the epoxy to lay 2 circles (first small then a slightly larger one) over each filled hole. It is a long time since I have done much fibre-glassing (building canoes when I was a teenager in scouts) so my technique isn’t very good. I made sure the pieces of cloth were very well wetted out on a plastic box lid before putting them up. So hopefully no dry bits there. The hardest bit is making sure no air bubbles, we won’t know until we sand it later.

Arms very tired (it is all overhead work) but we have done all 11 holes.

Got a bit cleaned up, now lunch. Rain due at 4pm so we will call it a day for fibre-glassing.