Blue Paint and Hokule'a
01 May 2018 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/Warm Spring
The fairing of the hull bottoms was going along quite well. I started with doing 1/3 of a hull side in one afternoon’s work, so a complete hull would take a week. We had rain, delays. I then did 2/3 of a hull side in a day, then completed that hull side the next day, and did 1/2 the other side the day after that. So, now we are just 1/2 a hull side away from finishing up applying fairing mixture. The keel bottoms have to be done, but they add up to about 1/2 a hull side in total.
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Then the sanding process, and then antifouling paint. I purchased another gallon of hard paint from Defender Marine. They had given me a $75 gift certificate in lieu of matching a very low price on ablative bottom paint when I had purchased 3 gallons. So, I will have 3 gallons of hard paint and 3 gallons of ablative. The hard paint goes on first, blue, and painted up 3 inches higher than the waterline. Then the ablative paint, red, goes on up even with the water line. That will leave a bootstripe of blue hard bottom paint 3 inches wide.
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I also ordered a power pack to jump start the engine if the battery should fail. It also has a compressor and an AC power outlet.
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Now it has been a few days and the job of fairing the hull sides is done, only the keel bottoms remain. We’ll be applying bottom paint this week at some point. My hope to have the bottoms done by the end of April is almost coming true.
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A 10 amp-hour 12 volt brick battery came in to power the electric bosun’s chair, plus a second 12 volt winch arrived from Pilot Automotive. More things were put on order, UHF/BNC adapters and coaxial cable. The cable will be used to build a couple collinear VHF antennae and also to provide the link from the VHF radio in the pilothouse to the whip antenna on the mast. The coax coming down the mast ends right about amidships, so about 10-15 feet has to be made up. The mast cable is a UHF connector, also called PL-259. The VHF radios are using the corresponding female connector on the chassis, but the dAISy AIS receiver has a BNC connector. The scheme is to use both the DIY collinear antenna and the masthead whip on either the radio or the AIS receiver, so we need adapters to convert from PL-259 to BNC and vice versa. The collinear antenna will work on the VHF radio with a BNC to PL-259 adapter. Out at sea the higher masthead antenna will provide greater range for AIS targets while the VHF radio would not be useful to contact anyone because of its limited range. Near shore the VHF would use the masthead whip for communications and weather reports that are broadcast using powerful shore based stations. The AIS would then be using the collinear antenna and give up some of its range.
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The bottoms of the keels went so fast that I had almost a whole day to fill with odds and ends. I stirred up the two gallons of hard bottom paint that had been sitting for so long, and that took a while. I shopped and got wide masking tape and more water, as I was almost out. The wide masking tape was cheap and had already proved to be not good for making a sharp edge between paints, but it will be used along with narrow Fine Line tape which does make a sharp edge. I was told that the wide tape from Dollar Tree, at a dollar a roll, was no good. I tested it out and it seemed to work fine. The rolls are short, so I got 4 to do the 4 hull sides. Longer tapes from the more expensive stores cost out a bit more than this cheap tape, like 4 or 5 dollars for 55 yards. The cheap tape was 58 feet. I bought it because it was the first wide tape I ran into while shopping. The auto parts store only had narrow tape.
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I still had time to get more things done, so I hoisted the gas tank up into position and bolted its 14 bolts to secure it. This took about 2 hours of hard labor and I was finished about 6:30 in the evening.
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I found that all my activity got me up early the next morning. I was still sore and achy. I didn’t want to start work so early, but I ended up doing it anyway. First the port hull was brushed off to remove sanding dust, then it was sanded again when I found some areas that needed to be scuffed up for a coat of epoxy as primer.
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Then I brushed it off again and wiped down the waterline area so that the masking tape would stick. I followed the marks for the bootstripe with the Fine Line tape all the way around the hull and rudder, then added the wide masking tape from the dollar store to make the masking wider. Then I began applying epoxy on the inboard side of the hull from the bow to amidships and all the way down on the bottom of the keel. The sun was beating down on the other side of the boat and I saved that for later when the sun moves over. I only primed from the bow to amidships because I wanted the primer to be fresh and not completely hardened when I started painting.
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When I began painting it was with a large paint roller and the work went along very quickly. Soon I had painted all the primed area. I then primed from amidships back to the rudder and part way around the rudder, there was extra epoxy. I painted down almost completing the inboard side of the rudder, then decided to take a break and have some food. Leftover red coleslaw.
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Then I decided to prime the whole outboard side of the hull, below the bootstripe, because now the sun had put it in the shade. I primed and primed. Then I used the same small foam rollers that had worked so well on other paints to paint the bottom paint. Although I had envisioned painting two coats on the port hull, I gave up after I got to the bow and now had one coat of blue hard antifouling on it. It was around 6 o’clock and that was it for the day.
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The order from Defender Marine came in, two solar showers, one all-the-bells-and-whistles boost charger/compressor/power pack, and another gallon of Pettit Unepoxy Plus hard bottom paint, blue.
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My Hawaiian brother, younger, sent news that the voyaging canoe Hokule’a had left Hilo on the Big Island for a visit on the lee side, the Kona side. Then news came that they had damaged the canoe, but not so bad as to be able to make repairs in Honolulu at Sand Island where the photos of Hawai’iloa were taken. The image is from Sam Low.