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Cabin Wall Rebuild Part 3: Mostly Sanding
When last we checked, I had applied a thick helping of fairing to the cabin walls. Now that we are in the boatyard, we can sand it smooth. This took a really long time. Luckily, Lauren found it hypnotically relaxing.
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Aft Cabin Part 1: Gutting
Polerys is neat because it’s only a 35 foot boat, but it’s a center cockpit, with an aft cabin. The problem is that the aft cabin has two twin sized beds, with a toilet in the middle. Because there’s nothing like sleeping next to a toilet. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to put a queen sized bed in there. In order to do that, however, I had to remove everything. I want to insulate it, too, so that means removing EVERYTHING.
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Working on the Mast Part 1
I haven’t posted an update in over a year. Not because I haven’t made progress, but because I haven’t made any meaningful progress. My original idea was to wrap up each project in two or three posts. But every time I try to work on a project, I get stuck. So I try a different project, and get stuck. Every bolt is seized. Everything needs two people. The weather sucks. It just never ends. I’m in Seattle, so it rains 9 months out of the year, and I can only work on the boat over the weekends, and sometimes I just need to sleep. Plus there’s always some sort of…
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OpenPlotter: A Powerful Open Source Marine Navigation Suite
The boatyard work is going to take considerably longer than I had planned. What I had hoped would be a 3 week use of my vacation time, might end up being the entire refit. However, in the meantime, I am making what little progress I can on whatever projects I can. Today, I’ll walk you through setting up OpenPlotter and OpenCPN.
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Cabin Wall Rebuild Part 2: Fairing, Epoxy, New Hatch, and More Fairing
Now that Rick and Jayme were done with their portion of the work, it was on to my portion. I had to fair all of the cabin walls, fill some areas with thickened epoxy, and install a new hatch. I did this over the course of like two months, so I’m going to break it down by project.
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Cabin Wall Rebuild Part 1
Welcome to my personal hell. I’m going to go off on a quick rant, and then I’ll get into the actual project. I purchased Polerys for $18000. At the time, the owner was in another country, locked down, due to COVID. One of her friends showed us the boat. She had scheduled all of the interested buyers back to back, so I was given a 30 minute window. Therefore, I had a limited ability to look at the boat.
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Sail Pack/Lazy Jacks Part 2
Welcome to part 2 of my sail pack/lazy jack installation. Part 1 can be found here. Now that the pack was made, it was time to splice the lazy jacks. I got three 50 foot 1/4 inch Dyneema ropes from Amazon. They were designed for truck winches, but they were less than $40 each. Then I got two 100 foot 3/16 Dyneema rope from West Marine. I’m not expecting a ton of stress on the lazy jacks. I got 6 low friction rings from Mauripro out of Florida, mainly because they had 6 of them. You’d be surprised how few places have these, at a reasonable price.
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Sail Pack/Lazy Jacks Part 1
Polerys came with a sail bag. It is old. It is falling apart. It needs to be replaced. Eventually, I’ll replace all of the canvas, but the sail bag needed to be replaced sooner rather than later. It was ripping, it was stained, and it was super duper tight, so it was hard to close. Plus, there weren’t any lazy jacks, so lowering the sail was always… an adventure.
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Splicing New Reefing Lines
Polerys didn’t come with reefing lines. Well, not real reefing lines. The original setup was to tie some rope to an eye on the port side, then loop it through a reefing loop on the sail, then cleat it on the starboard side. If you wanted to use the second reef point, you’d use the same rope and process, but through the second loop on the sail. If only there was a better way.
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Final? Sail of the Season
I keep thinking it’s the last sail of the season, but then a lovely weekend magically appears. We took Polerys out to test out the new blocks. And also because it was sunny. It was a little cold, but we were projected to have 8 knots of wind. Perfect for a couple of amateurs.
Rebuilding a 1963 Chris Craft Sail Yacht 35 to sail the world
