40 Hours Later…

We were in extremely high spirits as we drove home from Shenny this past Saturday – we were finished sanding!  All told we spent 24 hours scraping and 16 hours sanding.  There’s no doubt about the fact that it was hard work, but when we think about how much money we saved compared to hiring someone it was definitely worth it.  The best part is that we shouldn’t ever have to do it again.  If for some reason we do (like, twenty years down the road), we’ll pay someone given that we’ll be living in a country where the labor costs will be substantially lower than here in Connecticut.

The worst part about Saturday’s job is that we had to scrape and sand the boat where the poppets were.  Pegu Club has seven poppets supporting her while she’s on the hard so we had not yet scraped the sections of the hull that they covered.  Each square was only 12″ x 12″, but as Jeff started scraping the first one he commented that he wanted to do this like he wanted a hole in his head.  In hindsight, we can’t believe we scraped the entire hull.  We are SO glad we didn’t buy a bigger boat!

Now all we need to do is wait for warmer temperatures so we can put on the barrier coat and bottom paint.  The drying time is based on air temperatures, and we need a minimum of 41 degrees so we likely won’t be returning to this project until mid-March at the earliest.  In the meantime, we can turn our attention to other items.

On Sunday we drove back down to tackle a few small things before Shenny’s chili cookoff.  First up was to put the Origo stove back into its slot.  We had an Origo on Little Bristol that we really liked, but it wasn’t recessed so we were glad to see that Pegu Club came with a recessed, gimbaled Origo.

As with many boating subjects, cooking fuel tends to arouse passion on the internet forums.  People who use propane or CNG argue that alcohol stoves are dangerous and slow to heat.  Generally they are basing this on the old pressurized alcohol stoves which definitely sounded like they were sketchy.  Non pressurized alcohol stoves are, in our opinion, less risky than propane or CNG stoves in that there isn’t any chance that denatured alcohol can blow up.  It’s true that the flame on an alcohol stove can be hard to see, but we don’t think it’s that difficult to put your hand over the stove to feel if there’s heat coming from it.  We also didn’t find the time needed to bring water to a boil to be excessive.  The bottom line for us was that we were happy with the cooking time, Origo’s are bulletproof with very few moving parts, and you can buy denatured alcohol anywhere.  For us it made sense to stick with the Origo.

We had brought Pegu Club’s Origo home to give it a bit of TLC.  It was pretty grungy and the sliders weren’t working properly, so initially I wanted to chuck it and buy a new one.  That plan was thwarted when we discovered that the recessed gimbaled Origo’s had been discontinued, so if we wanted a new recessed stove we would have to give up the gimbal.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay $430 for a stove that didn’t gimbal, so we spent some time brainstorming how we might be able to recess Little Bristol’s Origo (which we had kept and was gimbaled).  Finally we decided to see if we could get rid of the scuzz and fix the sliders.  After a lot of elbow grease from me and some excellent repair work by Jeff, we had the stove ready to go again.  We need to buy one set of potholders at Defender’s Warehouse sale, and we want to eventually touch up the paint, but at this point it was good enough to put back on the boat.

Setting it in place took about sixty seconds, so we then turned our attention to installing the Nature’s Head.  No pictures yet because we still need to hook up the vent hose, but we were pleased to discover that the Nature’s Head fit in the space where the old head was located without the need to make any modifications.  We probably only had a few inches to spare, but it fits and that’s all that matters.  In fact, this install was easier than when we put it in Little Bristol.  To me it’s another sign that our Bristol 29.9 is perfect for us!

Slowly but surely, she’s getting put back together.  It’s hard to imagine that in 9 1/2 weeks we’ll actually be in the water!  Yay!