Our wayfaring voyagers, dear friends and neighbors are back from three months (95 days, actually) cruising around Florida and the Abacos (Northern Bahamas). Welcome back, kids!
Kay and I, with Jody and Al aboard, met them coming in the harbor channel with the flats boat. Photo op!
Chasing them back into the BSM channel, a great shot of our South Shore condos in the background and Tara and crew in the fore:
Nobody cooks first night back (traveler’s commandment), so dinner at the Jurrens’…
I needed a consult with Doug on the new section of Sojourn’s cap rail… it was a teak peek…
And yesterday, Doug was kind enough to accompany me to the yard for a few four-hand tasks, and wouldn’t you know it – the green fungus continues to propagate:
One messy job was installing the sintered bronze grounding shoe on the bottom of the hull for the HF radio(s). Messy because we slathered 3M 5200 adhesive around all the bolts before Doug had to hold this heavy shoe against the bottom of the hull while also positioning and driving four screws into the holes I had drilled awhile back. Meanwhile, I was inside tightening the nuts against a backing plate.
I’m still amazed that this porous brick made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny bronze spheres has the surface area (important in HF, or high frequency radio wave propagation) of a hundred square feet of copper! And it’s only eighteen inches long. Amazing…
Another messy job (easy to see why in the pic below) was installing an additional thru-hull and seacock. Why? Well, I had one bilge and pump more than I had thru-hulls, so away we drill! Fret not over the excess adhesive which will get trimmed away after it has cured and when the tape is removed.
So what possible application could there be for one hundred and one teak plugs (called bungs)? Funny you should ask.
Holes are drilled into the rub rails that mount on the sides of the hull (think of bumpers on a car). Screws are countersunk in those holes to secure the rub rails to the hull. Bungs are then glued into those holes over the top of the countersunk screw heads, and then chiseled off flush with the surface of the rail and sanded smooth. No more screws visible, and over time, those bungs (with their grain properly aligned with the rest of the rail) simply disappear from sight. Besides, they’ll also be covered by continuous lengths stainless rub strake (strip) eventually. Notice the tapered plug cutter bottom center below that was used to create my gaggle of bungs (sounds like a punk rock lyric):
And what does a bung’s womb look like? Sorta like the old piece of rub rail that I replaced by duplicating it in new wood. Now it has been reincarnated into the bungs above:
Here’s a bung lightly tapped (temporarily) into a countersunk screw hole to illustrate the concept.
At almost thirty years of age, and after leaving some of the wood behind, still attached to the adhesive on the hull, the backside of some of the screw holes were getting a tad ragged, so I decided to grace them with a few layers of West System epoxy (see the darker spots below). The screw holes will be redrilled, nice and tight, once the excess epoxy is sanded off. Each of the eleven rail sections, totaling about ninety linear feet, was cleaned with two treatments of TSP90 (by Red Devil) before being sanded with 80, 120, 220 and finally 400 grit wet sanding (whew!). Now they’ll get sanded again just to remove excess epoxy before being redrilled and reinstalled on the boat.
Below, I’m hogging out 3/8″ of material on the bottom side of the new section of cap rail. This is where the hull joint fits tightly. This side of the rail (bottom) doesn’t have to be particularly pretty, so I won’t waste a lot of time here. The critical scarf joints at each end were dry fit carefully yesterday, chiseling and sanding to get a good fit with the existing rail. Doug and I spent about two hours getting those joints right. I generated a LOT of saw dust yesterday and today!
Well, enough of my nonsense. You have better things to do than to read this crap, so I suggest you get to it.
Lator, ‘gators…
