Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

Genoa Sleeve Cover Repair This season sail cleaning and canvas repairs are the order of business. A few years back I sewed this Sailrite Sleeve for my foresails and I really like it a lot. It might not be as convenient as a roller furler with a UV guard on the leach of the sail but I can get a better sail shape when underway and think that it is totally worth the extra work of putting the sleeve up and down. Mid-season one of my webbings broke free of its stitching at the time it was not a bit deal but I decided now that the cover is off for the year and home for the winter it would be a good time to do a little repair job. I grabbed out a few tools and got down to it.  The hardest part of this job was finding the end of my thread. Stuffed in a box for the last year it was a bit tangled up.  Once that was done I used my speed stitcher to sew the webbing back on. Note I'm really not great with this tool but at this point, I really want to get better so instead of going back int...

  Another great project from Sailrite.  This is one of the more complicated projects I've done.  There is a little cutting, long sewing runs, and a bunch of hardware.  Sailrite has moved to a paperless model so study up on the  You Tube video first. Sailrite service is super.  On this project we had a miscommunication about the color of the fabric and Sailrite's service stepped right up and fixed it.   Measuring is the first step. There are two ways the fabric can be laid out depending on the diameter of the rolled furler. After the measuring it is time to get out the hot knife and cut. Sew Sew some more. Bam UV protection for your fore sail without a bulky cover on the edge of your sails.   Video Montage 1 Installed video.

Started getting ready to paint this weekend and then the sky got dark and it sprinkled on and off the rest of the day.   

Video 1:  VC 17 paint mix:   Stir It Up, Baby.   Save those carry-out dinner cartons they are the best paint roller trays.  You can close them so your paint does not evaporate.  Video 2: Legends After trimming in the waterline and keel. It is time to cover some square footage with the roller. Video 3: Time Warp Some different views from around the boat.  Video 4: Moonlighting Finishing up the last section with the roller. Video 5: Almost Time for a Drink One more trim coat around the waterline and she is done. I always do a final trim coat around the waterline with some of the thicker paint from the bottom of a quart.

This year Tower Marine has me in yard storage and I'm less than 100 feet from the power! I decided I to have to take this opportunity to go to work on the deck with the power sanders and get some prep done.  Things always look worse before they get better right. I started by grinding on the hatch with my dremel tool. It had a lot of gel coat cracks and I found the dremel to be the perfect tool to open up the gel coat, so I could fill them with West System 410 fairing compound. After the first round I sanded and laid down a layer of high build laquer primer. Then I sanded and filled again. Then another layer of laquer primer. It is not perfect but it will be much better than what I started with.  The cockpit area remains one of the trickest to work in.  All the corners and working around the drains has taken some time. I removed all the hatches and sanded in all the little crevise that allow water to drain from the seating. It took quite a while to get all the traveler pos...

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 ...