New hatch slides

Aaand now I need new hatch boards to fit the larger hatch slides. These, by the way, were one of the most unpleasant things I've ever had to fabricate, because I didn't have exactly the right tools for cutting and shaping, and had to resort to manual methods like nibbling and sanding. Ugh. And I don't love the way they fit and don't think they'll last, either, making them possibly a horrible investment in time and pain. Oh well.

Main hatch and port bunk rebuild

For the last couple of months I've been working on refurbishing the main hatch and turning the port bunk into more of a storage and cooking area.

The port bunk now has a new hatch on it, which will eventually be completely lockable, so it can't fly out in case the boat gets rolled. It also has a hard storage bin, similar to the ones on the J105, for things like the auto-tiller. That will have a canvas cover flap on it, again so things can't fly out. For now I haven't done anything about mounting the stove securely, but that's next.

The main hatch situation was pretty annoying. The original hatch slides were teak, and they were badly worn, with the caulking failing in the corners and leaking onto the bulkhead directly below the hatch. They came off with extreme prejudice! Additionally, there were about 6 useless holes in that bulkhead screaming to be properly epoxied.

So I removed the bulkhead below the hatch, which had the oval opening through which the bilge is accessed, and the bulkheads between the bunks and the bilge area. I made a replacement for the section directly below the hatch, which you can see in the photo, just to keep things looking neat, but I won't be replacing the rest. I fabricated hatch slides from an aluminum I-beam, which I'm about to install. The rest of the openings I've made are staying open.

Lately I have been really inspired by the economical interior design of the Mini Transpac 6.50 boats, which have that area all open, and, since none of those bulkheads are structural or even contributing to  the folkboat's rigidity, I'm going to work towards that more modern and open design back there.

Next up: move the batteries to the centerline, directly below the companionway. More photos coming!

Re-doing the cabin sole

Koan's cabin sole was upholstered in a non-skid patterned vinyl that was dirty and disgusting. I'd seen photos of other IFboats with that removed and I was really aching to get it off mine.

The removal of the vinyl lining from the insides of the hull and the plywood floor boards was annoying enough as it was. But it turned out a huge challenge lay further ahead. The vinyl had been glued on with a disgusting green glue that was resistant to most everything I tried on it. Three glue removers did nothing, and acetone worked, but required huge amounts. Finally, a couple months after avoiding the subject, I decided to try Franmar's Soy Strip. This is the stripper that saved my ass when I re-did Shadow Line's deck back in 2007-2008, and I should've thought of it earlier, except that it's intended for much much more tenacious things, like anti-fouling paint. In any case, Franmar to the rescue! A couple days later I had the majority of the green glue off, and I wasn't the worse for exposure to VOCs, since Soy Strip can be handled without much protection. In the process I did accidentally get some of the stripper on other wooden surfaces in the boat, so some of those will need to be stripped and re-varnished, but one could argue that needed to be done anyway.

I wrapped the floor boards in a natural cork liner that I don't think is going to hold up too well. But there wasn't much choice, as they were completely coated in the disgusting green stuff. I didn't reinstall the holes for the table or the tabs for pulling up the floor boards, since those are all superfluous. Now I just need to go over the hull sections and remove the remaining bits of glue with acetone and a towel...

Weekend trip to Diablo anchorage

This weekend Kitty and I went for a short trip to Santa Cruz Island and back. The forecast had been for  not a lot of wind, so we had planned to arrive at the west end of the island, then sail east along the coast checking out the various anchorages. I was hoping to anchor at Lady's cove. It turned out that there was actually quite a lot of wind once we got within 5 miles of the island, probably close to 18 kts with 4 ft swells. We made landfall a bit east of the west end, then sailed wing-on-wing, past Cueva Valdez, which only had one boat, to Lady's, which was occupied by two large sailboats and a fishing boat, leaving no room for us. So we continued east to Diablo anchorage, which only had one other small boat anchored at one end, and stayed there.

On the first part of the sail to the island we only had about 10 kts of wind, so Kitty took the opportunity to test her aerial photography kite. The kite looks like this:

and then she added the camera on a rotating base, which looks like this:

We got lots of photos of the surface of the ocean, and a few cool ones of Koan, like these:

The anchoring was uneventful, and we had a very nice dinner. Unfortunately there was a lot of surge in the anchorage, and I didn't sleep very well in the rolling boat. But I woke up happy that we had not had any anchor alarms during the night.

The Sunday morning project was to test the launching of the dinghy from the foredeck. That wasn't a problem, and I paddled it around the cove to make sure it didn't take on any water.

I took some photos of Koan anchored:

Then Kitty took over the dinghy and I went snorkeling, and out on the beach to explore it, and to meet our neighbors:

After we dried off, we read a little, and then, when the wind really picked up (because we like maximum difficulty) we planned our de-anchoring and exit. We had lots of wind on the way back, so we kept the main reefed most of the time and still made 7 kts over ground. We made it back in 4 hrs, which is my personal best record so far!

Another fantastic sailing movie

I've previously posted about "Hold Fast", one of my favorite sailing movies of all time. Well, it's time to add another much anticipated release to the list! I followed Nick Jaffe's trip across the Atlantic and the Pacific through his website BigOceans, and actually learned a lot in the process. Now Jack Rath has made a documentary called "Between Home", which you can download here, from Nick's footage before and during his passages. I watched it the other night and I loved it. I thought it was honest and beautifully shot, and really those were the two things I was looking for. It's not prettified and it's not what I would call a happy ending, or a happy anything, really, movie. It was true to the sense I've gotten from reading the writings of and chatting with other people who've pulled off similar things. Highly recommended!

The custom dinghy

I've wanted a hard dinghy that's small enough to fit on Koan's foredeck, and big enough to carry one or both of us and the dog from the boat to shore when we're out at the islands. When someone posted a free Naples Sabot on craigslist, I jumped at the opportunity. The Sabot is 8 ft long, and we only have about 6 feet of length on the foredeck, before the dinghy starts to interfere with the anchor cleat. In addition, the cabin is in the way, and the dinghy can't lie flat. I didn't like the idea of it sitting on top of the cabin top, because it's difficult to stabilize it by tying it down, and it's also very high, with a lot of windage. So the obvious solution to all our problems was to shorten the dinghy and build a custom transom that fits around the cabin top. 

I used 3/8'' ACX plywood, which I screwed in at three places, and two layers of fiberglass tape. Then I painted everything, and made an overlapping transom piece that screws in with 5 bolts, tightening around a thin rubber strip to make it water tight. 

It seems to work!

New split stern rail

This is going to be a real quality of life improvement!