Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

This weekend I continued working on the cockpit floor. This is the outside of the area I'm building up support for. The cockpit is mainly what is precipitating this project. It is pretty scuffed up and has had some modifications done over the years.   On the inside, I'm building up the corner with West System coated matting. Last weekend I was thwarted by gravity.  The layer I put on stuck to the vertical points with no problem but it fell off the horizontal (bottom of the floor) sometime after I left. Hopefully, this second time is the charm.  I also got a 1st coat of filling primer on the hatch. I will need to do some more filling and sanding but the first coat of primer will help me see where I need to work more. Still trying to decide on a white paint for the smooth surfaces of the boat. But the Kiwi Grip arrived this week and I love the box it came in.  I'm going to have to keep this away for the penguins.   

 With another amazing weather weekend, I decided it was time. One of the projects I've been eyeing on Woodstock is a deck re-finish. To make this happen I started with a bit of boat yoga.  I emptied out the sail lockers and went down in them to lay a few layers of supporting fiberglass mat to the bottom of the floor. The floor has some spider cracking and I think the extra support below will help prevent it from coming back once the top is ground out and filled.  The hatch is one of the areas with the most spider cracking so I ground out the offending areas with my Dremel tool and then mixed up some West system with 410 fairing compound.   The non-skid deck in the cockpit is in pretty rough shape and I've been doing a lot of research to figure out what to use.  I want to keep the original look of the non-skid and the best match I've found is Kiwi Grip.  I'm still up in the air on what to use on the smooth surfaces like the hatch and bulkhead where the compass is mounted

  I made it down to the boat last weekend. These warm days pushing 50 degrees make it crazy tempting to pull the covers and get to work.  I suspect Mother Nature is about to throw a giant snow ball at us.   In anticipation of more snow I pulled the cover off the bow to take a few measurements and recoil the roller furler. For now I'm leaving the cockpit covered.  Spring can't get here soon enough and there were no shortage of people in the yard working on little projects today.

 Thinking Spring will be here soon so we can get back to this.