Go west, Old Man: 6/24/07

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Couple of Quick Vids

of the boat being dry docked, shortly after she was raised from the water.

She was put back into the water yesterday after almost 2 weeks of hard work. The finish coat looked GREAT! It looks so good in-fact, that I'm thinking it will probably motivate Kat and Phil to start on the deck paint sooner rather than later :)

I took quite a few pics of the put-in. We would have had the traditional bottle of champagne, but they hadn't painted the name on her yet -- so it didn't seem appropriate just yet.

Here's a walk around her while she's still on the stands, showing off the new finish coat.

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Shiny!

Outboard mounted...

Here comes the TraveLift to pick her up!

This time they had to wrap the 'straps' up with wax paper so as not to 'pull' the bottom paint, making it sag or stretch. Bottom paint, as it turns out, contains two very important ingredients for salt-water craft.
1. A chemical cuprous oxide that helps to prevent bottom growth. (barnacles, sea anemones, sea-weed and various types of algae)
2. A 'sloughing' agent. This basically refers to the ability of the bottom coat to 'slough' off in layers, exposing a fresh layer with more of #1, cuprous oxide, to allow for continued protection from the sea.

You can see the 'slings' wrapped in that white wax paper.

They slowly raise them and the ground crew verifies that they are in good position before lifting.

An initial test, to make sure the slings will hold the weight w/o slipping.

Then they start to lift.

And we now have a road worthy sailboat :)

Here's where she's heading...

as you can see :)

All the way out to the end of the ramp before dropping her...

Then I head down to the dockside to get a better vantage.

and watch for her keel to touch the water for the first time in nearly 2 weeks.

Down a bot more...

Touchdown!

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Well, not quite...

OK... touchdown!

Removing the slings is somewhat entertaining. Remember the 'keel' of the boat sits between them... so if the boat were to simply back up after hitting the water, it would catch the rear sling and pull it.

So, they have to lower the rear sling enough that the keel will clear it when they back the boat up. Notice in this shot...

After that, instead of powering up the boat's outdrive and hitting reverse, they just raise the front sling a bit, creating enough lift to drive the boat backward and over the rear sling.

Then they let go of the front sling, and that's all folks!

A couple of the happy couple (third wheel in the water).

Lenny was on hand to help us raise the mast into place and took a few shots himself.

It turned out sooo well!

Neat angle

The happy captain...

and the final resting place, back on the moorage at Boston Harbor marina after an EXCELLENT sail from the Swantown boatyard!

And she's SOOOOOOO much faster! We knew that a properly prepped and painted bottom can make a HUGE difference in speed, but we had NO IDEA!

Friday, June 29, 2007

Sanding and Keel grinding...

Wow, what a job! There were 3 discernible coats of bottom paint under there, who knows how many were actually there. So, turned out it was easier to sand it all the way back down to the factory gelcoat than to try to get her through evenly to one or another layer.

Turns out that the boatyard has a TON of environmental regulations about how to prep and paint your boat... and what sorts of things can and cannot be done. The keel of this little boat was nothing but old paint and rust... so it had to be ground back down to the original steel in order to get the bottom paint to adhere properly. Unfortunately for Phillip, the regulations require that the area being ground be walled-off to prevent all the fly-off from the grinder from .. well, flying off (into the environment and the sound).

Hence the plastic wrap. You can also see in this shot the bottom is nearly prepped for paint, all down to gelcoat. Poor Phillip spent almost 4 days in that little plastic tent grinding through 20+ wheels before the keel was finally ready for paint.

So, as one can imagine... one gets a bit dirty when grinding in an enclosure of that sort.

Here's another shot, can anyone say drag queen... lol.

Phil got a neat shot of me in my Tyvex suit... oh yeah, those are basically cheap overalls to protect our clothes and head from all the junk that flies around while we're sanding / grinding / painting etc...

So when you grind down to gelcoat... sometimes you wind up hitting fiberglass. So we decided to put a light coat of 'Barrier Coat' (BC) over the hull and keel. BC is basically a light 2 part epoxy that is rolled on just like paint.

More BC.

another shot...

and one with the bike :)

Notice the 2 shades of gray here? YES, finally on to the actual bottom-paint...

That's all for now. We've actually finished the upper part of the boat too, above the waterline. It got the final coat of paint yesterday and is curing. I'll post up some shots of that along with shots of the boat going back into the water sometime in the next few days.

Haul out

Haul out day was entertaining. Phil wanted to get some work done to the mast, fix the mast light and some other hardware, so we had to lower the mast (which we did while it was still in the water!!) I had to help steady the base, while one person held a halyard to control the initial drop, and another was behind to catch the mast once the halyard could no longer control the fall.

So, no pics of the mast on its way down, but here's one just after.

The haul out was interesting. There's basically this huge set of pylons over which a large crane-type thing drives and lowers these long straps into the water and underneath the boats.

Two fellas on the dock below steady the boat over the straps, one near the bow...

the other at the stern...

and... here she comes! I took LOTS of shots here basically to try and capture the entire run out of the water to the dry dock.... so keep scrolling :)