Friday, 5 June 2015

All’s Fair



   I am in love with fairing compound, West Marine's “featherlight” compound to be exact.  But apparently I suck at its application and so I keep sanding it off, and trying again. 

 I have learned that trying to make a boat “fair” is a mathematical problem that only the gods can solve.  From what I can gather a boat is fair when its curves are the exact curves that it was born with, before time a tide pitted and warped the wood, before chunks got taken out by rot or bouncing off a bell buoy, or before an over-eager lass with a heat gun scraped it down to below the top of the plank. (Hey, it can happen.  A couple of times.)

I’ve also learned that the more you sand a boat and then look it over, the more you realize you need to sand it more because you did such a bad job the first, second and third time.

This week was really wet and rainy so not much done.  But hopefully I have put the fairing compound away for good as of today, and tomorrow Jeffie will get the sanding of his life, and then get primed. This weekend!

Paul is in Maine this week, but swears on all that is holy that when he gets back he will put in the Dutchman and reef out the keel seam to put in new caulk.

There are just some tricks that this old dog is better off not learning.

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