Applebee 27 - Homebuilt Trawler
April 14th 2023
House Work:
Donna has been busy outside ever since this nice weather arrived. She cleaned the yard, scrubbed the back deck, scrubbed the front steps and here she is painting the edge strips. . . and smiling!
Boat Work:
A few things are happening on the boat project.
Donna is painting 'Kiwi Grip', a water-based textured product (sold as non-skid for boat decks), onto the previously painted interior plywood walls and bulkheads.
Before she started the galley bulkhead, I dry-fit a stainless steel hook to hang a skillet. I will add two mahogany chocks at the bottom to hold it snugly in place. Because this will be a permanent installation and we don't want to ever run into a situation where we needed to replace the skillet and couldn't find an identical one, I ordered a spare to keep in the basement.
Donna tapes off one area of wall at a time. She then applies the product with a small roller and stipples the edges with a paint brush.
Plywood is hard to 'finish' but, in the photo below, you can clearly see the impressive result of Donna's work. She just completed the section on the right. On the left side of the photo, the wall has not been done yet. What a difference!
Here, she's attacking the forward wall (bulkhead) in the bathroom (head).
Donna packed stuff for breaktime and for lunch. All day, the water was dead calm. We took a break at 9:00am and had coffee in the cockpit. Later in the day, the temperature got to a wonderfully warm 23C.
Last year we ran the motor using a portable fuel tank. This year we want to use the onboard tank. I worked on the tank connections, starting with the filler hose. In the photo below, you can see the connection through an open hatch in the cockpit floor. The other fitting that you can see on the tank is for a 'vent' hose.
The filler hose comes through the aft bulkhead and into the port side stern locker where it attaches to a gas-fill fitting on the quarter deck. In the center of the photo below (taken from inside the locker) you see another, smaller hole. I drilled this one today and coated the inside with a putty of thickened epoxy. This will seal the plywood from the elements and act as a chafe guard for the vent hose, which will attach to the same deck fitting.
We made good progress in this lovely weather today.
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