Scrape, scrape, scrape…

Scrape, scrape, scrape…scrape your bo-at, scrape your bo-at.  Yes, “Shake Your Booty” by KC & the Sunshine Band has been running through my brain when I think about this project.  No need to thank me for the ear worm.

The last few weekends have seen slow progress on our latest project of scraping the bottom.  It’s not that it has been particularly time-consuming.  It’s just that intervening circumstances have dictated that we only put in a few hours each weekend.

Saturday, November 14th saw winds that were way too high for scraping.  Environmental regulations require us to minimize the bottom paint debris that ends up on the ground.  We’ve been using tarps to catch the paint as we scrape it off, but winds that day were scheduled to gust up to 40 mph.  There wasn’t any point in even trying to scrape with winds like that.

The next day’s forecast looked better, so we drove down to Shenny and quickly got to work.  Today we were going to focus on the keel, so Jeff took the port side and I took the starboard side.  After a few hours the winds started kicking up again, so we pulled the plug.  We still made some good progress though.  Well, Jeff made better progress than I did.  When he came around to see how I was coming along, he jokingly said, “What have you been doing?”  Clearly his technique is better than mine.

Jeff woke up with a sore back on Saturday the 21st, but he was game to put in a few more hours of scraping.  He proceeded to work on my still-unfinished side, while I expanded a bit on what he had accomplished the previous week on the port side.

After Jeff’s back had enough of scraping, we switched to pulling chainplates.  The stays (which are the cables extending from the mast) are attached to the chainplates, meaning the chainplates hold the mast up.  Original to the boat, we definitely wanted to replace them before we head out.

We could probably have waited a few more years, but there were signs that water had been leaking into where the chainplates penetrate the deck so we needed to rebed them.  As long as we needed to rebed, we figured we might as well pull them and replace them now.

We had rebedded the chainplates on Little Bristol, and removing them had involved quite a bit of grunt work because they were slightly bent.  We also had to drill out several bung holes so we could remove the wood work that was covering them.  Needless to say, the job on Little Bristol took a little while.  Fortunately, however, Pegu Club’s chainplates are easily accessible so there was no need to remove any woodwork, and her port side chainplates came out rather easily.

Although there were obvious signs of leaking, the deck core seems good where the chainplates were except for in one area which is moist (but not goopy, which is good).  We’ll do a bit of research, but likely we’ll just drill the core out and refill the area with thickened epoxy.  Hopefully we’ll have equally good luck on the starboard side.

This upcoming weekend is Thanksgiving, so we have a four-day weekend.  The plan is to go to New York City on Thursday for our semi-traditional dim sum and holiday windows viewing, leaving us three days to hopefully finish scraping and pulling the remaining chainplates.

Fingers crossed!