Bill and Laura, the owners of Bolero, arrived late yesterday for a visit and to see the boat.  Today, we spent the day working through a relatively short and straightforward list of questions to resolve.

Among the decisions made during the day:

• Toerail profile finalized:  Profile 4
• Issues surrounding the tiller and cockpit seat clearance determined and resolved (construction of seats to follow)
• Latch mechanism and waterproof seal for aft hatch finalized
• Deck hardware placement finalized (mooring cleats, sheet winches, deck compasses)
• Myriad other minor questions asked and answered, and important society-changing boat-related discussions held

We also played around a bit with waterline, boot top, and cove stripe questions, and I placed some tape mockups on the hull to give a general idea of (well) the ideas.  We suspected that the changes to Bolero would make her some unspecified amount heavier than a stock Shields, but not as much as one might first think.  As part of this conversion, I also removed a significant amount of weight in the form of heavy fiberglass cockpit seats, air tanks, and portions of the fore-and sidedecks.  Therefore, the net weight gain seemed to be less than the sum of the new materials added.

Still, we felt that raising the waterline by some amount was necessary, based on the original paint scheme and several photos that showed approximately where she had floated before.  In the end, we decided that we'd raise the bottom paint by 2", with a double boot stripe as shown in the conceptual drawings, along with a slim cove stripe near the eventual toerail.   The tape mockup shown in these photos actually does not represent the final decisions we made, but gives an idea of the proportions and direction we were headed.

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