January 3, 2016
Nomad 16
Sunday
With all the spray painting complete, I removed all the masking tape, paper, and plastic, exposing the boat again in full for the first time since I first taped her (or will it be him?) up several months earlier. It was great to see the whole boat again, and with the fresh new hull I was inspired anew to attack the original decks (badly in need of cleaning, polishing, and varnish work) and interior. I’d postponed–actively and otherwise–work on the hull for a long time, but it was great to be on the other side of the hull work. I’d been wanting to use this paint color for ages and it had always been my vision as I imagined what this boat would become.
I’d seen this apparent phenomenon before, on another boat with another color, but I think the paint got darker as it continued its curing process. Now it looked much more like the expected result; at first it had seemed a little brighter.
The final step required to bring the new appearance of the boat together was to paint the bottom. This was a purely aesthetic requirement, as I expected the boat to live on the trailer so antifouling wasn’t strictly necessary, but the old red paint had to go. After masking off along the bottom edge of the boottop, I painted the visible areas of the bottom. I didn’t worry about the underside where things weren’t visible, and anyway, the trailer mostly got in the way of these areas and would have prohibited a decent paint job regardless. As a final touch, I added a gold leaf stripe just beneath the character line in the hull, where there had originally been a thin gold stripe. The devil is in the details.
Total time billed on this job today: 3.75 hours
0600 Weather Report:
22°, clear. Forecast for the day: Mostly cloudy, 34°