January 24, 2025

Danusia Phase 2-17

Friday

The next job on the agenda was to refresh the nonskid.  With the prepwork already complete, and the decks clean from the brightwork refinishing, I moved on to masking off for the nonskid application.  I wanted to give the fresh varnish some additional cure time before I masked it directly, and the weekend would give a couple additional days, so for now I worked only on masking areas where I didn’t have to tape the varnish, starting in the cockpit.

The nonskid would be Kiwigrip, a thick product that requires use of a special roller to obtain the texture.  Over a number of past applications, I’d found this to be a messy process, ripe for collateral damage to adjacent areas, so my practice now was to overprotect the nearby surfaces to prevent the frustration of paint splatters on unwanted areas during application.  Kiwigrip also requires that the masking tape be pulled shortly after application–a process I find onerous–but I’d also learned to make all efforts to provide for the easiest possible unmasking under this duress.  So these factors conspired to some level of overkill, I’m sure, for how I masked for the otherwise straightforward refinishing, but worth it to me for a more successful and easier application when the time came.

In the cockpit, I masked everything except the outboard edges against the freshly-varnished coamings, which I’d come back and cover after the weekend.  In the cockpit well, I added masking paper to protect against splatters on the sides of the well, and additional tape on all the other surfaces, arranging the tape so that the layer closest to the nonskid pattern was on top everywhere for easy pulling with the fresh paint.

The owner requested that I look into rebedding the lens on the midships deck hatch, so before I continued now I removed the hatch so I could work on it down on the bench when time and the spirit moved me.  More on this sub-project later.

Next, I masked where I could on the coachroof, including around the two hatches and anywhere that didn’t require directly masking on the new varnish.  I also masked the center portion of the foredeck, the bow cleats, and the forward end of the coachroof.  The rest would have to wait till the varnish had the benefit of the weekend’s cure time, after which I could finish up the rest of the deck masking as needed.

Total time billed on this job today: 4.5 hours