Gone with the tent, in with new paint!

After Kate nicely stripped all the old paint off and i removed some of the old wires and hoses, I did some caulking on the fwd break beam to prep for primer and paint. May not look like much, but  it took over 11 tubes of caulking.

First coat of primer. Even got it before midnight!

First coat of North Sea blue! Finally!

Cut out a walkway so the pups could finally hang out in the v-berth, and it's much more convenient for use too. Eventually there will be new doors there.

Added a dark blue stripe to the bases. 

And got the first coat of varnish on!

Yay for 40hr work weekends!

Be gone tar! Be gone!

The decks are coated with many, many coats of coal tar epoxy. Its an effective deck coating for a fishing boat that constantly works and stays wet, but for recreational purposes, it sucks. And we want it gone.

So it must go.

And what better to do on weekends and hours after work then strip coal tar off. A mix of specialized power tools and hammers did a pretty good job, then a couple laps with a power planer got it mostly down to bare wood. Though the coating soaks into the wood and never will really be gone.

This is after a couple passes with the planer.

When it rained or during wash downs, there was lots of water coming into the fish hold through the ends of the deck and around the center hatch coming. So I reefed out all the bad stuff, some came out like this, rotten and stinky and some came out as dirt, literally. Then I pounded lots of new oakum in!

A deck end ready for new oakum. 

New oakum going in. I don't make the prettiest curls, but i also wasn't being paid for it, so there.

We tightened all the deck seams, (use a hammer and a caulking iron to re-pound the old oakum that was still good), hopefully it will buy us a decent amount of time before a full reef out and re-caulk. Then we filled the seams with a old school material called Jefferies marine glue #2. Its the same stuff thats been used sine the days of tall ships.

Finally the deck was ready for painting. This is the first of 4 coats of primer.

First coat of paint, not really the exact color we want, but paint is easy to change.

Put up the Tent!

In order to get any work done over the winter, we needed to cover the boat in a giant plastic tent.

It was a gorgeous December day, but cold.

Along with lots of aluminum from the remnants of the days of active fishing, we no longer needed the old diesel day tank for the diesel stove that no longer took up space.

Just another truck load of stuff to the scrap yard.

We used 2x12's to make a ridge pole, then 1.5" pvc piping for the tent framing. Amazingly it withstood the numerous 60+ knot win storms we had.

With the help of a friend who has done this many times, we played the plastic out in-between wind gusts, then used a giant propane torch to shrink in down tight again the framing. It works like heat shrink.

We put up some christmas lights for the season.

And a live tree!