How to move boat and workshop from France to Poland

 Well, in fact I have no idea how to do this in general. In my case it went like this:

It took around 28 hours of driving in total, split over 2 days. Ever since I have been a bit preoccupied trying to make this new place habitable and I have not started working on the boat yet. I do plan to though, before the winter is here. It means some updates should start appearing soon.

until then.

Finishing the deck and the cockpit

After the hull fiasco I turned the hull over and started on closing up the top side. The cockpit plating went on covered in 3 layers of epoxy in places that will be hard to reach (the for now closed-off lazarette). Other than that nothing special to report here, standard procedure was followed: pre-wet, glue and screw with temporary fasteners, fill the screw holes with epoxy and screw in final stainless fasteners.

 

 

Same thing for the foredeck:

The main deck, or the cabin top is made of two plates joined on a butt block running amidships.

In the end a hatch will be mounted, probably in the opposite direction to what is in the picture below - to reduce the probability of a wave delivering all of it's content inside the cabin.

All that rested was glassing the newly build deck. Alas, I had no time for that so I decided to waterproof the entire top side with epoxy and some varnish. I just gooped it on knowing that I will have to sand it off anyway before actually putting on a reinforcing layer of glass at some point after the move.

I did turn out looking kinda good, but not good enough for me to want to keep the wood visible. It is going to be painted white eventually.

tot de volgende keer

How not to glass the hull...

...lest ye be forced to do much of the work again. After much sanding.

Ok. Let's start. By the time I reached this stage the temperatures went up to SCORCHING. it must have been over 40C in the tent, even in the late afternoon. But since I was running out of time I had to finish the hull in order to flip it and waterproof the deck for transport to the new location (a trip of almost 2000km).

 The orange peel effect seemed not too bad, easy to sand out and the biaxial fabric makes it easy not to bite into the fibers - once you start seeing the white lines of the stitching you stop. The orange peel is caused by two things I presume: the unwillingness of the peel ply to yield to the curvature of the hull and probably some carelessness of mine while laying it.

 

 

 

The rest of the process, as noted above, was painful: the heat meant doing everything really fast as even the slow curing resin left not much more than 5-10 minutes of working time. Fast means sloppy. Especially in such a furnace. In retrospect it would have been better to opt for a different glassing scheme that required smaller pieces of cloth, but well, once I started the hard route I could not just stop as I would have wasted a lot of glass. The end result does not look terrible in the pictures below but most if what is laid will have to be sanded smooth to the point of being almost completely gone in places and some new glass will have to be laid.

The bow turned out great, but as I moved aft the results kept getting worse and worse.

 

All in all I don not recommend working in very hot conditions. And what I screwed up I can fix, it is just some additional work. I do have plenty of time now, so it will be aok.

cheers,