Lackey Sailing | Skeedeen 2020 11

May 6, 2020

Skeedeen 2020 11

Wednesday

Now that the varnish work on the companionway doors and hatches was complete, I reassembled the pieces with their hinges and reinstalled them on the boat. I chose to replace all the original slotted bronze screws in the hinges and elsewhere with new Freason head screws, as I had long tired of fighting the old screws’ shallow slots.

This wrapped up the brightwork, and the bulk of the project overall. I inspected and checked over all the through hulls and seacocks for the owner, and installed the batteries he’d brought along with the boat. The boat would be going straight to launch when she departed here in a week or so. I found that one of the plastic battery hold-downs had been broken, perhaps during removal or at some other time, and part of the hold-down screw was broken off inside the threaded hole on the battery tray itself. I was able to remove the broken plastic stud by hammering in a flathead screwdriver and then removing the screw. I ordered a replacement, but it wouldn’t arrive for a week or so in our new world of longer, old-fashioned (and somehow strangely tolerable) shipping times.

After buttoning up the boat for the most part, the final job remaining was to paint the bottom. After masking off the boottop with some gentle-surface tape (which I hate, but I didn’t want to risk real tape on the fresh boottop), I applied two coats of green antifouling to the newly-stripped bottom.