BeBop Gets A Facelift Part IV

Wow did it rain hard on Friday. We received over 12 inches in about 4 hours time. Why do I mention this? My new ports had problems with leaking when first installed if you remember me describing it. I thought they just needed some settling in time and a touch of silicon where the two rubber end pieces met. Well I was right! When I opened her up on Saturday the ports didn't leak at all. (whew!) The companionway did and it ran down into the port aft locker, but it was very minor and only took a couple paper towels to soak it up. I think when I build the new washboards and put the dodger back on (after I make it) it won't be a issue at all. Beginning to look like I might have a dry home in heavy weather after all eh?

Saturday the weather gods did *not* shine on me. (rainy, cold and windy) I'm getting used to it, so I used the 1st half of the day to run some errands and didn't get back home until about noon. I spent the cold afternoon putting the very last of the fiberglass resin and micro fiber on the inside of Notes. She's getting very close to having the inside primed. Figure another three or four hours of sanding and she'll be ready. It's tuff to stay focused on the bigger picture (BeBop) when I'm so close to having Notes ready for the water....but then I can't exactly take her around the world and in pinch she's completely usable right now. Just not finish painted and no....you don't get any more pictures of Notes until the launching ceremony. (quit laughing...there IS going to be a ceremony. I don't care how small she is.)

Sunday's plan was to sand on Notes and pull the marine head out of BeBop as I'm not going to be using it. The fiberglass resin on Notes wasn't dry yet so Rich and I set her in the sun to dry and commenced to ripping out the head. Now I imagine many of you wonder why in the hell I'm doing this. Well....marine heads are smelly, high maintance, prone to failure and a pain in the butt. Many people feel that a chemical porta pottie is cleaner and easier to deal with and I fall into this camp. BeBop didn't have a holding tank for waste anyway so that would of cost more (by more than double) than the porta pottie...which I still need to purchase. You may think this is very primitive but I will disagree. Think about this for a sec... In port (with luck) you can use the marinas bathrooms and showers, underway 3 miles offshore you bucket and chuck it, so the only time you will be using this is at anchor and then it's just for number two. Anyway, pulling the head out sucked I tell ya. It's so tight in there you can't reach all the nuts and bolts without a few 4 letter words. 2 hours later it was thrown from the cockpit into the yard with a large amount of satisfaction. The thru holes are glassed into the hull so they will stay put, I'm just going to silicon the sea cocks closed in the event I choose to put a head in again at some point in the future.

After that rather nasty job was taken care of, the weather was much better than it was predicted to be (less wind) so I decided to change the plan and ended up painting the cockpit. Rich helped me tape all the hardware off to save some time and off I went with my trusty paint brush.

I was going to save this picture for the last before and after when I have the cockpit locker installed again but screw it, I have to show you what I'm doing right? This is what it looked like about a month and a half ago right after I had finished sanding it down. Before this weekend I had primed it and sanded it again in preparation for finishing paint. You can see were I bonded down the locker cover..er..thing the previous owner cut into the seat. No clue why...you can get the 6 gallon fuel tanks in and out just fine. It will be safer offshore this way.


This is after the first coat of brightsides paint, the tape isn't coming off til tomorrow...I literally just finished when this was taken.


Sweet eh? eh? It came out ok...you can see the brush marks in the paint from a distance of about 3 feet which I'm not real happy about and I missed a couple of runs too. The runs will be sanded out and done over but all in all I'm pretty pleased with it. I don't think it will be a big deal or so easy to see when she's in the water with all the standing rigging, running rigging, dock bumpers, seat covers, cockpit locker, lifeline netting, bimini etc etc etc is all installed. (Reminder to self again, she's a cruiser not a show boat) Also something to keep in mind is outside the water every little thing is amplified and so easy to see. The same effect happened when Rich and I put Notes on the ground today...90% of the areas that still need sanding turned invisible...ground effect..something..I dunno. But when something is below eye level you can't see it as well. When we put her back on the sawhorses, yep...still there. Weird. Anyway...A second coat will probably be applied closer to when she's going back into the water since the cockpit is a very high traffic area.

Well that's about it for this weekend, if the weather is nice I'm hoping to finish sand out the blisters on the bottom and prime it up next weekend. I'm beat, think I'll go grab a drink then crash for the night folks. Until next weekend, Fair Winds...