August 4, 2016-Paint Job

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Masked and Ready

Sometimes I leave a story up on this blog even when I have a new one ready to post just because I like looking at the lead photo in the old one. The last story, about the new generation of sails, is one of those. When I connect to the internet that photo of the new mainsail pops up on my home screen and I love looking at it.

But we've now got a back-log of stories so it's time to move on.

Last week we finished one of the nastier jobs which are periodically required to be done on this boat: painting the interior. I hate that job, it has to be done about every eight years, and we just finished it for about the fourth time since we've had this boat. Well, we painted the main cabin. The forward cabin, head, and aft cabin were left to later, but the main cabin is what we see, and what visitors see, and it had gradually gotten really dingy. The white was almost yellow. The overhead was downright ugly.

So we ripped into it in late July. We started with sanding and filling, then cleaning and masking, finally, in a big push, we rolled on new paint everywhere in the main cabin in one frantic day. We moved off the boat that night and again the next night during which the paint fumes were intolerable, and while we touched up and put on a second coat in some areas that needed it.

So it's done now. It's not the best we could have done at it; we could have sanded more and used more of a premium paint, but that version of this project would have doubled or tripled the duration and the cost. Life is a series of compromises. We did the 80/20 job. That's OK. The boat looks very good now, and the last time we did the premium job it didn't last any longer anyhow.

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Port Side

Even though I don't have the photo of the beautiful new mainsail at the top of my blog to see every day, when I lie back on my settee I can look at a bright, clean, overhead and that's nice too.

Click here for more photos.

Jred & Judy, SV Wings, La Cruz Huanaxactle