Well I haven't been doing much with the sailboat the last couple of weeks. But I've been working on a friends 36' Chris Craft sport fisher. He got a great price on the boat a couple of months ago and has decided to move out of his duplex and on to the boat, trading an $850 per month rent payment for a $300 a month slip fee. He has an outside berth at a small marina south west of Sacramento in a little town called Freeport. The slip has a great river view and he is very happy with the arrangement.

Well he is trying to improve the boat which was built in 69' and had a very ugly carpet in the berths and main salon, we talked about the alternatives and decided to go with an engineered wood floor glued and nailed to the plywood decking. After the floor is down I will go back and scuff the finish then put 4-5 coats of varnish to protect the floors from any water or moisture.

Here are some pictures of his new boat.



From the front.


The aft deck and flybridge.


Another Aft shot, the nice thing is that the all 3 of the sliding panels at the back move, so you and open them all to port, starboard, or move them to the middle depending on the deck configuration.

Here we are starting to lay the floor on the lower deck in the master berth, a lot of compound cuts and angles.
That is my employee Nate setting the cut pieces in place to make sure everything fits right.


Here is the main hallway, notice the bilge hatch covers? They will all have to be cut separately from the rest of the flooring so that my friend can access
the bilge in the future.

This is what the main salon looked like while we were laying the flooring down.

The finished shot of the downstairs deck and stairway, I still have a lot of finish work to do, varnish and trim mostly.

Here is the finished floor with bilge hatches in place, they will be trimmed in a black aluminum to clean the hatch covers up and also something to put weather stripping on to seal the hatches.

The finished salon floor you can see the 6 hatch covers again these will be trimmed out to blend in with the floor.

Another shot of the salon taken from the rear deck.

Final shot of the salon with rug and couch.
My friends wife is out from New Mexico where she lives and works to help him move onto the boat so I will not be doing any other work to the boat for a week or so. But when the floor is done I have to rebuild two raw water pumps, take out the electrosan head and install a composting head, install a propane cozy cabin style heater, possibly remove the "huge" generator, and replace the refrigerator and electric range and oven with propane or diesel versions.

While Nate and I were doing the flooring last week a lot of debris came floating down the river from the heavy rains the prior weekend here are some pictures.







These things were trucking by the boat at about 3-4 knots and catching against some of the boats and houseboats along the dock. The last shot is of a tree that was probably 50-60 feet long and actually got jammed between the pontoons on the houseboat 3 boats up from my friends boat. We tried to get the tree loose but with the current that was impossible, and before the marina staff could get a boat out there big enough to move the tree it literally tore the house boat from the dock, spinning it around. At least we were able to get a line tied to the aft end and kept the house boat from drifting away toward San Francisco.
Once the Houseboat spun around the log broke free, drifted past my friends boat and got hooked up on the houseboat one down from him, this time it got hooked on the railings and cabin. Finally they were able to tie onto the boat and haul it out into the water away from the docks, God knows what damage it did downstream.

I expect to see more logs like that this week after the torrential rains we got this weekend.

Well I'm sure there's more I should be writing but I'm tired. I will update more for my one or two readers later.
Enjoy your fat Tuesday.