28 Years of Paint...

There was a bit of work to do on the topsides. The toerails were broken in a number of places where blocks had pulled through them caused by the increased loads from the new rig. The deck gear wasn't laid out well, the paint had long since lost its grip and there were the odd cracks in the paint that needed investigation. I bought an array of sanders and set to work with much help from our crew.

It was a big job removing everything - and I mean everything....28 years of paint in all different colours filled 3 buckets. The job of filling all the holes where all the fittings came off took much longer than I expected - about 120 bolt holes just for the toerails alone. The decks are 2 layers of ply with foam between and were in much better condition than I expected for a 28 year-old boat.

The fibreglass had the odd small crack and also I'd been a tad over-zealous with the sander so I needed to learn how to do fibreglass repairs. Luckily Kim McMorran was working on a major repair job (a launch that hit a rock at 17kts!) just a couple of boats away. He didn't have time to do the work for me but we agreed I would pay him to show me how to do the job properly.

It was fun....reminded me of the papier-mâché puppet, Punch, I made as a kid. However, after the fun part came the grinding. Kim sent me off to buy a disc grinder. This was a major step forward for someone who was terrified of power tools and had never owned more than a cordless drill until Candu II became part of my life. Again, Kim showed me how to do the job properly and I must say it came up good.

As these things go, when you look close enough at your boat you find a whole lot of things you didn't know about and a job that was going to take a few short weeks stretched into a few long months.

We took the manual bilge pump out from the cockpit floor to see if we could get a replacement rubber part and found it could never have been working - one of the rods was missing.

Thankfully Franz got down under the cockpit to get it out and we later installed a new one. I also found the anchor locker hatch had a bit of rot where it hadn't been glassed so I had a new one made. While working up in the anchor locker we also found the anchor had punched a hole in the side of the locker and that had to be repaired as well.

I got Wellington Boatbuilders to put a skim coat over the glass so that any future sanding efforts would not damage the glass again. The boat looked really good without the toerails and we decided not to put new ones on. This meant a bit more work to tidy up the edges but it was worth the effort. It certainly took 10 – 15 years off the look of the boat.

I also had to do some repair work on the rudder where the fairing had some tiny cracks which had, in turn, cracked the paint. Kathy and I spent a whole day sanding the paint off the rudder. It seemed every time Kathy came out to help the weather was dreadful and this day was no exception. 2004 was a cold, wet and windy winter.