Sprucing Things Up

I took advantage of the two sunny days we had this week to get a lot of sanding done on the boat. The toerails and cockpit coamings were completed, as was the mast. While this took much longer than I had anticipated, I was pleased to have it done, even if the wood still didn't look as good as I would like. After being neglected for so long, the coamings will probably never look perfect again, but I figured that making them smooth and then glossy will help hide how degraded the wood had become. The toerails were replaced at some point, but the bit at the bow was not, resulting in the color difference noted below - not a huge deal, and hopefully it will be less apparent when it is all varnished.
The cockpit looks good, but the wood is substantially darker than I would prefer. Thankfully the paint still looks good, which should help brighten the area up a bit.

After spending two days sanding, I was happy to get 1 coat of varnish on before we get rain for another week. This coat was heavily thinned and should do a good job of sealing the wood - as I applied it, the wood was really soaking it up, which also made it look darker and uneven.

The mast also received significant attention. Early on Wednesday morning I applied the first coat of varnish, thinned 50%, and let it dry while I attended to the toerails and coamings. Later in the day, I applied a second coat, this time thinned 25%. Both of these went on very smoothly, and the wood was really soaking it up.

The mast was already looking much better, and I was pleased that all the preparation was paying off. But, as I mentioned earlier, the forecast for the next ten days includes 9 days of rain. If I waited for the sun to come back out, the boat would never really be ready for the water, so I knew that I had to find somewhere indoors to varnish over the next week...

While the mast would fit in the living room, that idea was quickly denied. So I had to get pretty creative with fitting the mast in the house. I have a great workshop and garage under our house, but its only 20 feet long, and the mast is 26 feet. It also needed to be accessible so that I could varnish it, and I need to varnish a lot of other boat pieces so it couldn't block off the shop.

Ultimately, I ended up clearing out the crawl space at the garage, and building a track that runs up under the house. There's only about 2 feet of headroom in this area, but by allowing the mast to slide out, I can apply varnish to the top 6 feet (while the bottom 6 feet of the mast sticks out into the street) and then roll it back in and deal with the rest of the mast. Not the best scenario, but I applied the 3rd coat of varnish this afternoon, and it worked really well. The point where I stopped momentarily to move the mast wasn't visible, and if it becomes a problem down the road, this will be 20' above deck and I doubt it will be too noticeable.

Here is the top of the mast out...

While the bottom of the mast sticks out the garage and rests on my car...

And then after rolling the mast back into the crawlspace...

Given that the house was built in 1780 on top of ledge, building the track was one of the more uncomfortable and dirty experiences of late, but I think its pretty cool and I was really excited when it actually worked. It was also pretty cool to see the structure of the house up close - the original floor joists are massive, and a couple of them still had bark on the underside - definitely not the type of stuff you find in new houses.

Hopefully, this whole set up will let me get a coat of varnish on everyday for the next week, which will help keep the whole project on schedule.