Renaming Ceremony

We finally got the boat clean enough to where we weren’t embarrassed to have guests aboard. Originally I had planned to have a bunch of friends over, but with the COVID19, we decided it best to limit it to my fake parents, and then have a boat warming party later.

I went to art school, so I used those skills to design the logo. I knew that I wanted to eventually repaint everything above the waterline, but needed the name of the boat now. I decided to have two vinyl labels printed, one for now, and one for after she’s painted. The people at Seattle Sign Shop were super helpful. The two decals, as well as two smaller ones for the life ring were only $350.

Lauren loves to sand, so she got the fun project of crawling into my inflatable raft and spending 3 hours sanding off the old name. After she finished, she cleaned everything down as best as she could, and I got to work installing the vinyl.

The decal comes sandwiched between two layers. The tricky part is installing it in the water. Stupid waves. With one hand I was holding onto the toerail, while the other hand was trying to actually do stuff. It doesn’t help that my raft isn’t exactly a dinghy. The slightest movement caused the entire thing to flex.

Using a measuring tape, we located the center of the boat. Then we measured out on each side where the ends would be. Then we located how far down from the deck we wanted the name. Some blue tape, marker, and adjustments later, we were off to the races.

The next step was to line up the vinyl in position. Then I added some blue tape on the top end of the protective cover. Look up “hinge method” for more details. I sprayed some soap mixed with water over the area of the transom. Then I flipped the sticker upside down to remove the protective layer closest to the hull. Here’s where things went downhill. Since the transom is curved, some of the blue tape came off. That meant my previous work lining everything up was essentially useless. I was also in a rush now, because I didn’t want the adhesive to dry out. I quickly got the vinyl “close enough” and started pressing the vinyl down with a felt ended card. You have to be very careful to remove bubbles. The soapy water is supposed to allow you to move the vinyl as needed, but it didn’t work for me. Perhaps I didn’t use enough.

In the end, the “P” side is about half an inch too high. That’s perfectly within the range of acceptable for me. Especially since it will be scrapped off when I repaint the boat. I’ll just store more stuff on the port side so the boat will be on a lean.

An hour or so later the guests arrived, I read the prayers to Poseidon and the Wind Gods, I had my first alcoholic drink in 5 years (I figured this was a reasonable excuse), and we had a great evening.