Rodeo pelo mundo: Work in progress

The work continues going strong despite the extremely hot temperatures. It’s been around 40C for the last two weeks and it’s very challenging working under this heat. Monika has arrived and we are both working hard to get as many projects as we can before relauching in early December. We managed to strip the entire deck from it’s hardware, we are epoxing all the holes, redrilling and rebeding all the hardware. But before we can do that we will paint the deck.

Monika also took the cabin sole as a project and we stripped the entire varnish of the sole and now have sanded to 320 grit. We will use Cetol for the sole (up to 8 coats).

We have also decided to redo the entire bright work on the boat (outside wood) we are now well underway to finishing up stripping and sanding the wood. We will be ready to apply epifanes varnish the outside wood, something along 8-10 coats. It’s a long tedious process but it will look very sharp when all done. We can only apply one coat a day and they have to be wet sanded in between coats so as you can see 8-10 coats will take some time.

We have decided to redo the entire canvas on the boat (dodger, bimini, sail cover). Unfortunately the canvas is a job that we will not be able to do on our own and had to hire a company here in Trinidad do undertake the job for us. We are also redoing most of stainless steel work. This will include solid stainless bars as our lifelines, a new bimini with a solar panel bracket mount on top of it and reworking of our wind generator mounting bracket and location. This work is also being done by a local Trini contractor and we should have the stainless and canvas done with in three weeks.

The bottom have now been stripped of it’s 10 coats of antifouling, this job needed to be done as the antifouling was peeling from the bottom. We will apply two coats of epoxy primer and than three coats of fresh new antifouling paint.