Nov 14-16

We spent saturday from noon till 8pm and then sunday from 11am till 4pm at the boatyard. The only accomplishment towards the O'Kaye was test fitting the dinghy motor bracket for the stern rail. It was designed for having the pipes come together at perfect 90 degree angles, and the pearson has some small curvture to the piping so i will have to do some grinding to get it to fit on the rail properly. It will be nice to have when it is finally mounted though. The rest of my time was spent working on Tai's boat. We got his engines running, varnished some more wood, and starting rebuilding his alcohol stove on saturday. Sunday i spent most of the time building his tarp frame and then putting the tarp on. Here are some pictures of the tarp frame. I need to build one for my boat when i return from leave.

The rest of the weekend

Tai and I spent all of saturday afternoon and evening, and sunday afternoon at the yard workin on his boat. The O'Kaye got moved from next to the crane to another spot on the yard where it will stay the rest of the winter. They moved it on a hydraulic trailer which was really cool to watch. We got more sanding done on tai's boat and got more interior work done. We figured out the face shields weren't doing so great to protect our eyes while sanding so we picked up some snow sport vented goggles. They look really dumb, but they work really well. We have now been sanding Tai's boat for three weekends and are only about 1/3done. We decided that it was going to take too long to continue sanding. We talked to the boat yard guy and he is going to talk to his sandblasting friend and get us a quote to get both boats bottoms blasted. Hopefully we will hear back from him tomorrow. As soon as the bottoms are clean will start applying bottom paint, but our temperature window is decreasing for getting the paint applied. Here are some pictures of the faceshields, goggles, the hydraulic trailer, and the sweet F-350 towing the trailer.

A friday night at the yard

Last night Tai, Jack, and I spent most of the evening at the boat yard. Jack and I were sanding off bottom paint while Tai stripped out the interior of his boat. The sanding is still coming along pretty slow, but everything else is coming together pretty well. The interior is looking alot better already. My boat is finally out of the water. Hopefully today when we go back i will get to start working on my bottom paint, but that would require us to finish Tai's first. Here are some pictures of the O'Kaye out of the water.

Tai's boat site

http://formula26.blogspot.com/

The winter work begins!

Last weekend a couple of friends and i got the mast down but left the mess of stays and shrouds everywhere on the boat. Friday night we moved the boat from my mooring at the Coast Guard Academy to Boating on the Thames, a small boat yard just north of the academy. Saturday, Tai and I, spent twelve hours at the boat yard. Got all the stays and shrouds disconnected from my mast and neatly stowed as well as removed the spreaders. We also took the stanchions and lifelines off to make sure when we put them back on everything has stainless hardware since it currently does not. A little bit of further work was done on the wiring but not enough to go into further detail. She now sits at the yard waiting to be hauled. The rest of our time was spent sanding the bottom of Tai's boat. He purchased a thunderbird formula 26 last weekend and it got delivered to the yard during the week. I will put a link to his site up once he gets it started which should be very soon.