We Hate Fibre Glass.

Three weekends ago we started taking out all left over wires and plumbing then we got on ripping all of the fibre glass ledges off the hull. This was not in any way fun, interesting or pleasant. It just consisted of taking a hammer and chisel and clouting them off. With fibre glass dust everywhere, sweating like pigs and the three cats trying to get involved you can see how it wasn’t a lot of fun. For those of you who have never worked with glass it’s miserable, itchy work that if you’ve never needed to do don’t start now. No matter how much protection you wear it still gets through and stays in your clothes even after a few washes. Next thing to do was take the second head (boat loo) out which again is about as interesting as an empty pack of smokes. Just crowbars and hammers and a lot of pulling, tugging, yanking and sweating. We then swept up and stood back appreciating our work. We’re coming up with some great ideas. Hopefully when I get back from my break in England and Scotland we’ll get a scaled CAD model of the whole thing and then you can see what we’re going for and how we’re going about achieving it. We decided to take a closer look at the core of the deck because I could tell when we drilled the old holes out that there were some bad spots and personally I don’t like core under the stanchions anyway so why not replace it with glass. So we started cutting through the first layer of glass to the wooden core and it was all going well just cutting about 6 inch by 6inch squares out around all the stanchions but then I got to one on starboard a little aft amidships that I had to go further than 6 inches and then I had to keep going and keep going and I eventually got to solid core after cutting back about 2 feet by 10 inches. It’s not pretty. We haven’t yet finished the cutting out process yet but we should have it done and re-glassed before I leave this coming Tuesday. We would rather it done before I left because there are now big holes for water to get into and destroy yet more of the core. Of course it’s covered but that doesn’t mean nothing is getting in.

The Cats.

Sorry to all those English readers but I’m using an American computer with American spell check and you know how they’ve twisted our awesome language but there’s not a lot I can do.

Also apologies for the lack of blogging we’ve just been doing too much.

If you have a sharp eye you might have noticed a few very cute kittens running around the boat. These are the boat cats Ayra, Bilbo and Ollie.

We didn’t quite mean to get to three but things happen here. I have these friends in town on a boat called That, an amazing trimaran built here on the river. Their cat had just had a litter of kittens when I went over to see how they were getting on with That because it’s another project boat. When I eventually got to leaving I said that I could be interested in one. Then Jonas arrived and having owned cats he immediately thought it was a great idea. So we went over and one very quickly turned into two. We were very happy at this and went and got the food and all was well.

Literally the next day Paul of a boat called Samphire came back from his run and came to find us. Two weeks previous to all of this he had seen a local dumping four kittens into the jungle while on a walk. Once he found us he said he had just found one of these kittens after not seeing them since the dumping. He went on to say “seeing as you’ve already got two cats and I’m allergic would you take this one. So in comes Ollie.