Dinghy Skeg
17 April 2024 | St Marys, GA
Cap'n Chef Andy | Full on Summer
I was suffering with what seemed like a cold and also had allergy symptoms. I awoke and felt fine. The green pollen that was coating everything was gone. Maybe it will return.
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I had put a coat of epoxy on the interior of the dinghy and reinforced some areas that didn’t have proper fillets with improved fillet material, I call it “glue hard”. It’s colloidal silica with added fiberglass microfibers. When it sets up it’s like rock, impervious to ordinary tools. Best to shape it while it’s wet. Instead of dealing with that stuff the next day, I flipped the dinghy and worked on the exterior.
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First I sanded with the belt sander and the pad sander with 150 grit self adhesive paper. The hull was smooth with a lot of rough areas and divots. I dusted the hull, then made a mix of fairing compound. This consists of 50/50 colloidal silica/glass microspheres. I used a very large tongue depressor to mix and spread the mixture over the bottom of the hull. I did not try to create another layer on top of all the rest, just fill the weave in the fiberglass cloth and any rough spots.
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When I finished I thought I would sand and paint the exterior tomorrow. Then I realized I had forgotten about the skeg. Should I cut out a skeg and glue and screw it to the hull before painting? I will add it later. I want to see what the color, almond, looks like. Rain is coming again so I have to do what I have to do beforehand.
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Following the stock market involves following the Trump phenomenon, Truth Social, as it soared up to around 70 bucks a share when it was initially listed. The fundamentals indicated this stock has almost no value, gee, I should short it. Now, days later, it is around 40-50 dollars a share. I could not short it because there are no shares available to short. There is such a demand to short the stock that those who hold shares are not willing to part without a significant fee for anyone who wants to “borrow” shares to short. Perhaps there are Trump adherents who just want a stock certificate to frame and hang on the wall.
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My favorite stock now is Laird Superfoods. Nuff said. Clear One, a firm whose products I used during broadcast work, and who shot up when the pandemic forced people to telecommute and thus bought their products, now has a 50 cent dividend payable tomorrow. I can’t wait. There is a buy signal for it so I will hold.
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The next day I ran the grinders over the dinghy hull and applied a coat of Gloss Almond, from Rustoleum. I expected to see some irregularities but it was worse than I expected. There were patches where the glass weave was not filled and some dings here and there. I sent a photo to a couple of friends and one responded wonderful and the other said isn’t that just like the green dinghy you had before. No mention of the irregularities. The International Space Station, however, taking photographs of the recent total eclipse remarked there is a catamaran in Georgia with severe irregularities. Also no mention of the almond colored dinghy alongside it.
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I rushed ahead with the paint job because we have another rain event coming through early in the morning. Paint now or forever hold your brush. Most of the day will have some rain.
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In fact the rain event was a deluge. I planned to do my taxes indoors while the rain came through but by the time I got around to it the rain had stopped. I had been consoling Cornelia Marie over the phone because her sailboat engine and vehicle engine were acting up. Too much for her to deal with all at once. I retreated into the woodshop with the laptop and smart phone. My tax documents were downloaded somewhere on them and the wifi signal was strong in the woodshop.
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After going through all the ridiculous gathering of data to do my taxes I found out the tax prep service I was using was a sham, they wanted $66 for what should be a free simple tax preparation. I quit them and used Turbotax. Turbotax had some nice easy new features that made data acquisition very easy, except my newest Samsung upgrade had my .pdf files paired with Samsung Notes with no option available for the .pdf file apps I had been using since forever. The laptop’s battery died and I gave up on the woodshop. Back on board I used the phone. I still couldn’t open a .pdf but I could take a screen shot of it and use the .jpeg image with the Turbotax app. It took about 4 hours to do a very simple tax return.
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I was hungry and needed a quick meal. I tried the beaten egg in a bowl with boiling water thrown on it and made egg drop soup, adding ramen noodles and the chicken flavoring packet. Add some oyster sauce and sesame oil and it was acceptable. I knew I had to make a shopping list for some alternative meals. Chili dogs.
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The aftermath of the rain event was clearing skies and 40 mph winds. My allergies suddenly were going haywire. Either the winds were stirring up dust or pollen was coming in from the WNW. Maybe I was allergic to Kansas City.
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When I texted Komputer Ken about a shopping trip he said he was going to pick up Doc at the hospital in Jacksonville. Heart surgery. We returned to the boatyard and I borrowed the car to go shopping. $150 later I had ingredients for chili dogs as well as several other menu items. I forgot to get cabbage though.
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This time I started with a large skillet with a large onion, diced, drizzled with EVOO, and while it was starting to sautee, dusted it with chili powder, cumin, cocoa power, and a couple tablespoons of apricot preserves and peanut butter. A jar of chunky medium salsa went in and then 10 hot dogs. I used the boil/poach method so as to not burn the bottom of the pan. I had a couple chili dogs for dinner, donated a couple to my boatyard neighbor, and froze the rest.
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The next day I found a piece of 1X3 scrap lumber that I could use for a skeg on the dinghy. I quickly cut it with the correct angle and put it on the upside down dinghy. Perfect.
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I love meat balls but haven’t made any in a long time. I had bought some ground meat with that in mind. I also had kielbasa, but my plans to make soup with it were incomplete. Also there was a partial package of pepperoni from months ago. Pepperoni is forever.
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A very large onion was minced and thrown into a large skillet that already had a half cup of bread crumbs and two beaten eggs. The kielbasa was chopped with great difficulty. Try it. The pepperoni was also minced. Spices were added and the mixture was hand blended together with a pound of hamburger meat. When it was homogeneous it was formed into 13 meatballs. The skillet was wiped out and heated with EVOO.
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I could only fit 7 meatballs into the skillet and sauteed them, set them aside, then did the remaining 6. I set them aside.
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The remaining fat in the pan was not excessive so I sauteed diced onion for about 5 minutes, then added a tablespoon of minced garlic. Dusted with “Italian Spice Mix”. Added a large can of pureed tomatoes. Not Cento, too good for this experiment. The mixture in the pan was bubbling and I added as many meatballs that could fit without everything spilling all over the place. Tedious work.
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I began putting meatballs into zip lok bags, sauteed the last few in the sauce, bagged them all but one. Added the sauce to the bags, maybe a third of a cup to each one, and had the lone remaining meatball in a bowl with the remaining sauce. It was tasty. Not as good as Geoff’s.
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I ground away the paint on the centerline of the keel where the skeg should be. I washed the wood for the skeg and also cut off a pair of small diameter pvc pipe sections the length of the skeg. I waited a while to consider what I was planning to do. I made a small batch of epoxy and painted the skeg and the area it would be adhered to, then mixed some glue hard, smeared a bunch of it on the skeg, screwed it down, then formed the excess smoothly along both sides of the skeg. I had limited time to work the epoxy due to the heat. I concentrated on making it all smooth enough to encapsulate it later with a layer of glass and more epoxy.
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The next day it was hot and the epoxy would go off in a short time. I cut a triangle of glass to cover the skeg, soaked it with epoxy and the area it would be glued down. I used the pieces of pvc on either side of the skeg to keep the glass situated while the epoxy went off. I had dry clamped all this previously. I mixed the rest of the epoxy with 50/50 silica/glass microspheres and faired some rough spots on the hull. The heat of the day caused the mix to go off too soon. The fairing of the rough spots resulted in an even rougher finish than when I started.
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The image is of the newly installed skeg.