Wednesday, August 4, 2010

August 4, 2010.

A quick recap of he last few days. The fridge seems to be up and running although I think there might be some reinsulating of the box in my near future.

I got to work on a few cool boats including this one, whose helm station was reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise. Yes, that is my cheat sheet on the dash.

The dodger is almost ready for paint with the first coat of fairing compound applied and sanded. A few touch ups, a bit more sanding and we’ll be ready.

I was also able to get the hard bimini started. It’s a lot simpler than the dodger so the construction should go a bit quicker. I want to have them both done before we start to install either one. I’d like to get both of them onto the boat in one weekend.

I also FINALLY got the part I’ve been waiting for to get the anchor windlass up and running. It was some bizarre, low profile, metric bearing. So it looks like after more than a year of pulling the hook by hand we will once again be amongst the upper crust and hoisting our anchor with the touch of a button.

Last but not least, the dinghy. We were at the shop working on the dodger when my company’s co owner who I’ll call “Grant” announced that he had decided to clean up and sell his dinghy. He’s had it sitting in the yard for a while now and he finally decided that the dink had to go.

He left and the next thing I knew, I looked over and Christy was sitting in the dink on the lawn. I know what’s running through her mind as I say “You want that dinghy, don’t cha?”. She answers with a half smirking ”what do you mean?” Yeah, like I was born yesterday. You see, we have a bare bones 9 foot Caribe dinghy. It’s an excellent quality dink but the short length really hurts performance. Christy and I can plane quite nicely but with any additional weight aboard we find ourselves plowing along.

“Grants” dinghy is a 10 footer of lesser quality. But it does have the one thing I know that Christy covets, a bow locker. It’s a little fiberglass cubby that you can stow your anchor, lifejackets and other necessities. I proposed a deal to “Grant” and the dinghy is now hanging from the stern of the Veranda as we wait for an opportunity to do some real world testing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm confused about the dodger and bimini. Did you make them out of wood, then fiber glass over them or are they fiber glass or a combination?

Thank you.

S/V Veranda said...

I made the dodger out of half inch marine plywood. Once it was built we covered the entire thing (inside and out) w/ an eighth inch of fiberglass and the cut out the windows.

The bimini is 2 quarter inch layers of plywood bonded together with thickened resin. It will also get the eighth inch of fiberglass as a covering.