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.