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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 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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Small Upgrades
We’re starting to make some progress on some of the easy fixes. The old wooden blocks were falling apart. The metal parts were still solid, but I didn’t trust them, so we replaced them with some Harken blocks. Sadly, there was no way to remove them without grinding them off.
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The Refit Plan
Here’s my plan for upgrades and repairs. I see three “types” of projects. Projects I can do at home, projects I can do while in the water, and projects I have to do on “the hard”, up in Port Townsend. I have 3 weeks of vacation each year, so that’s when I’d tackle those big projects. One marina has a 2 year waitlist for a live aboard. The one I want, has a 5 year waitlist. I’m hoping the first one opens up, I can move aboard, save money, and then move to the other one when it’s ready. I’m basing this on priority, as well as season. For instance,…
Rebuilding a 1963 Chris Craft Sail Yacht 35 to sail the world
