It shouldn't be surprising--but it is. Once you remove the thwart and centerboard cap, you are left with really fragile centerboard trunk. If we were doing this again, I would leave it till last. It's been kind of fun to see how the boat was put together. The hull was laid up. Then they glassed in the seats and forward air tank. The deck was attached with pop rivets. The builders made extensive use of mahogany plywood between layers of glass. Nowadays I suppose they would use some kind of Airex foam. My only complaint is that the seats flex a bit too much, and our starboard seat is cracked inside so we will have figure out a repair before we can proceed with painting.
The top of the centerboard trunk is one thin sheet of chopper glass. Don't lean on it. |
The boat looks a lot bigger with all the deck fittings removed. Maybe more so on this boat! Because of the gin pole mast raising system, a few extra mooring cleats, and a lot of spinnaker fittings, the deck sprouted like mushrooms on a spring lawn. To keep track of all that stuff we made pictures of the deck and cockpit. The fittings went in plastic bags with numbers keyed to the pictures.
You could probably figure out where everything went without the little "map" but this should make it easier. |
Since we had to take everything out anyway, we are doing a few improvements to deck brace for the king post--rounding the edges, painting, adding nylon sleeves to the holes for halyards.
Next steps: Remove the centerboard, take off the stickers, and start the deck and hull repair. Probably time to start thinking about colors.
Once we repainted the deck of Heather during a 1 week break in racing and we took off all the hardware and put all the parts in brown paper lunch sacks on one of the settees. Due to a lot of rain and wind that week our project got behind schedule and we only finished the painting the same day as we were scheduled to leave (at 7:30 PM) for Vancouver to deliver the boat for Southern Straits. Well, we took the whole crew and we put the deck together on the delivery, with flashlights and a lot of sealant. The next morning, in Vancouver, we were ready to go racing, except the traveller cleats were backwards, which made trimming the main quite difficult.
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