Sunday 16 December, Jolly Harbour, yard day 6: If you want a job weel done, do it yourself!
Sunday today, so we treat ourselves to no alarm and sleep blissfully till 8am. It’s so lovely and cool by the morning. Lovely to get the fresh air into the cabin once the mosquito nets are pulled back.
Jesse says he is coming today to put the second coat of InterProtect on and then 1st coat of antifoul. Glen is not too impressed with his rolling (painting) technique from the first coat of InterProtect yesterday. He did apply it very methodically in vertical strips using a very large roller. But after the initial roll he doesn’t work the paint. This leads to us having vertical strips down the hull with thickened paint in places and too thin in others. So Cloudy Bay looks like she has ribs all over her tummy:(
Jesse arrives after breakfast and Glen suggests that he should stay home on a Sunday and let Glen do the painting. But Jesse is very insistent, I guess he’s thinking of the potential revenue loss.
So by mid morning Jesse is rollering the hull and Glen is in the bow thruster tunnel, wet sanding smooth the epoxy filler he had applied yesterday.
After 2 hours it’s perfect and ready for a coat of clear epoxy to seal in any bare fiber glass patches. Mixing and applying the epoxy is easy, but he has chosen a cheap brush and with every stroke the bristles are falling out! Picking them out of the paint is time consuming and leads to the epoxy going off a bit early.
He had hoped to also epoxy the anchor blocks which he cut out and sanded yesterday. So another batch of epoxy is made up. Hmm penny wise pound foolish. The epoxy is far more costly than a paint brush!
By this time the 2nd coat of InterProtect barrier coat has been applied. And yes, the hull looks even more striped. What Glen is alarmed about is how much paint he is going through. We had purchased 5 gallons of it hoping to get 3 coats on. But Jesse has used 4 gallons on just 2 coats. And we need to save the last gallon for under the current hull prop pads.
Jesse then starts almost immediately applying the first coat of dark blue antifoul – International Micron Extra. Glen is really tempted to shoo him off and apply it himself, but in the end lets Jesse finish it. The rollering on a pole (to reach the waterline) is quite strenuous, and with his face mask on he sounds like Darth-Vader as he grunts with the effort! If he got closer to the surface he is painting it would not be so difficult. But it’s clear he has no intention of getting himself paint splattered!
This first coat of antifoul uses 2 of our 4 gallons of paint. And we cannot buy it here in the islands. So finally Glen steps in and declares he will apply the last coat. He has to, because we cannot use another 2 gallons on the 2nd coat otherwise we won’t have paint left for the pad patches tomorrow.
So Glen puts on his paint suit and sets about antifouling a thinner 2nd coat. Needless to say, he manages to get the whole coat on using only just over 1 gallon of paint. He now wishes he’d interjected earlier. If you want something done properly you just got to do it yourself it seems 🙁 But looking at Glen’s state of exhaustion at sunset, I don’t think he could’ve done 3 coats.
This 2nd coat with an extra 3rd coat around the waterline and leading edges he finishes in the dark with a head torch. Finally he comes into the boat, acetone in hand, asking me to clean up his face and feet… which are pretty much completely covered in antifoul! We laugh at the contrast… We dont think Jesse got a single drip on him! Sometimes you have to get down and dirty to do a job correctly.
The evening sees us again roasting in the cabin, defending ourselves from the man-eating mosquitoes here! Hopefully this will be our last evening in the yard. We long to be able to use the sinks again, the toilet, the shower and not have to go up and down that damned ladder then walk through gritty dirt of the yard. Desperate may be more of an appropriate word!
Tomorrow it should all come together. Fridge coolers will be fitted and the boat props all moved to clean and paint those small parts of the hull that we could not get to. Fingers crossed it goes according to plan.
