Yes, it’s been a while, just over a year in fact but I’m back in the room.
A lot has happened in the last year and I won’t bore you with the details. There’s no point, you come here to read about my misadventures with the boat. So let’s have a recap. The last time anything was done on the boat was when I rather wisely filled in the hole where the fin keel used to be. Who needs a keel anyway? Not I! Well as it turns out some time last year I spoke to a boat wanker and he expressed concern that the boat would be dangerous without the keel. Pffft said I, it’s not like I’m going to need it as this particular sail boat is never going to be a sail boat and the keel is there to counter anything the mast does. Well that’s what I thought anyway.
It turns out upon further investigation the keel isn’t only there to stop the boat tipping when the sails are up, it’s there to stop the boat being blown about like a rubber duck in fart poisoned bath water, it also stops the boat from rolling. Now I’ve done some investigation and I have been reliably informed that as long as I put some ballast in the boat that weighs more or less the same as the keel that’s come off I should be ok. A suggestion was made to cut the keel up and then place it in the bilge somehow, so crisis averted. The boat should stay upright like a Viagra addled pensioner.
I’ve just spent the last weekend down at the boat, I put a good few hours in. Sixteen to be exact but who’s counting? Before going down to the boat I made the executive decision that I was going to totally remove the superstructure (Cabin and cockpit etc) so all that would be left would be the hull. To be fair I’d already started doing that last year. But then what? I’d be left with just the hull and nowhere to entertain those bikini clad girls I’ve always dreamed about. Hmmm. Perhaps I could rebuild the superstructure? I put a bit (not a lot) of thought into it and decided I would treat the hull as a blank canvas and then build the superstructure myself.
How the dickety fuck would I do that then? I’d need a metric fuck tonne of fibreglass, and some out of the box thinking. So I did a quick search online to see how expensive this decision would be. I found a company called East Coast Fibreglass and their prices seemed reasonable, they shipped in a couple of days and they have a pretty cool YouTube channel that has a few tutorials about how to do things. Most of which I watched to understand exactly what materials I’d need.
I placed an order which set me back just under £100 (someone remind me to add it to the running total here.)
It’s clearly not going to be enough but it’s a starting point. As it turns out I didn’t take any of it down to the boat as I knew I still had a lot of work to do to strip/cut everything off the hull so all I was left with was just the hull. More in the next post.