The weather this week has been excellent, not only for working on projects, but for walks on the beach, strolls to the gift shop for ice cream after dinner, and we've been able to leave the boat open and get a nice breeze. We've done some fine tuning to the BAA, with help from Shadetree, and it sits nice and taut, with a better arch than when we first received it. I finished putting the veneer and trim around the aft head repair & put three coats of varnish on the wood. We spent more time provisioning, stowing & cleaning this week. Some of the cleaning was due to the cloud of foam floating everywhere. Foam?

As mentioned last time, we have tackled the headliner project. Headliner is a foam backed vinyl, probably similar to the fabric that covers the inside of the roof of your car. The undersides of our decks, hanging lockers, cubbies, and most of the crew cabin, are lined with this to cover the inside (raw) side of the fiberglass. Well, as anyone who has owned a $100 car (can I get an amen for a $100 car?!) will attest, the headliner in a few decades old car will start to deteriorate and fall down. The headliner in a boat is no different. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it came down cleanly, but alas, the vinyl is usually falling down because the foam backing has degraded to a mess of crumbly dust, some of it still fiercely clinging to the glue it was attached to the hull with, and some quite free and ready to fly into a brown cloud at the least disturbance. Linda described this as "gross" and walked around all day with her nose and mouth covered with a pirate scarf. Check out all the dust flying in the video, and the pictures in the Photo Gallery album - "Refit Wrap Ups".



Ardent followers will remember that I spent a day in May sanding the old foam and glue off the hull and deck in the crew cabin, which he then painted white. The other two major areas we wanted to do are the undersides of the side decks in the main salon. We purchased new headliner material from Sailrite to re-cover these areas. The project involved removing all the old foam by sanding it off with an abrasive wheel, then thoroughly vacuuming and finally wiping the area down with alcohol. The headliner is then cut slightly oversized, and, after masking adjacent areas, spraying the fiberglass and headliner with spray adhesive. We used 3M High Strength (#90). All that is left is to place the fabric, smooth it out and trim the edges to size.

I have done this before with laminate counters and in the rebuild of my Triumph Spitfire, but never tried a piece as large as this (almost nine feet long). One of the complications is that quite a bit of wiring has been added, all the wires running along the area we were covering. With a bit of time, persuasion, and quite a bit of sweat, we managed to get most of the wires tucked behind the beadboard covering the hull, or behind the new headliner.

On the port side, we removed the cabinet to tuck the headliner underneath it. This gave us an opportunity to remedy a small leak from a chock that was replaced last year in the boatyard (by professionals...hmmm). We left it overnight for the caulk to dry, tested it with the hose the next day (test sat!), then replaced the headliner & started reassembling. Yea! Another big project is off the list!