I like that word: "crap". It can completely convey your point or feeling, without using more colorful (and negative) words which I wouldn't want to put in our blog. Yesterday we each had that kind of day. Louis was patching gelcoat (the fiberglass surface of our boat) and I was chemically stripping varnish (the picture actually shows the heat gun phase - that's actually the "fun" part of the job.). Anyway, Louis mixed up this very potent, toxic batch of white gelcoat "goo", mixing just the right amount of brown and yellow coloring to match our cream fiberglass. He had just finished patching various dings all around the boat when a wind came up and knocked the boat cusions off of their storage spot. He grabbed them (so they wouldn't fall in the gelcoat), dripping his tub of goo all over the place, and stepping in his patches in the process! Grrrrrrr! After cleaning all of that up, he waited. And waited. And waited. It seems he didn't put enough hardener in the gelcoat, and it wasn't "going off". (He was, though!) So....back to square one (or square minus-one, actually, as he now needs to remove the goo, mix up a new batch of gelcoat, try to rematch the color, and do the entire process over again! Crap!

Meanwhile, I was stripping the wood with a chemical stripper to get the varnish out of the crevices in the wood which remained after the heat gun step. I carefully taped all the edges where wood-to-be-stripped meets wood-not-to-be-stripped. Since we couldn't find the $50+ per roll "solvent-resistant tape", I used the standard 3M blue tape. I put several layers of that on, and then went over it with duct tape (my goal being to keep the stripper from stripping the good wood). Well, you can guess what happened. The stripper ate the tape and bled a little, peeling up a bit of the finish from the "good wood". Crap! Plus, it was a friggin' mess! Gooey, dusty, caustic chemicals dripping all over the plastic protectant, and me in the process. I had to shut the hatch to work on it, so I was sweating up a storm through my glasses & dust mask and could barely see...this stuff sucks! The good news is that the "good wood" I damaged is actually an already-damaged area we had decided not to tackle this time around. So, it's not a pristine area or anything. More good news: having learned this lesson, I will not be using stipper in hatch #2 (in the photo), where the beautiful pristine wood IS.

Anyway, that pretty much fit our definition of a "crappy" boat day! How was your day?