We finally get to see her beautiful bare bottom

The cast-iron keel of our Columbia 43 needed to be sandblasted, so I had Roberto do the whole hull.

As week three of the haulout comes to a close we are finally ready to do some painting. The cast-iron keel of our Columbia was in bad shape and really need to be sandblasted to clean out the corrosion before we faired and sealed it with epoxy filler. Since we were setting up for sandblasting anyway, we decided to have the yard's painter, Roberto, sandblast the entire bottom.

There was about five layers of old bottom paint on the boat. Another one would not be a good thing. Furthermore, the current bottom paint was ablative and I wanted a hard (non-ablative) bottom paint. You can put ablative over hard, but not the other way around. After struggling to remove all those bottom paint layers from just the boot stripe, I was not going to sand the whole bottom. The whole sandblasting operation was almost a thousand bucks, but worth it. There's nothing like a beautiful bare bottom.

For the last several days my wife and I have been sanding and filling, sanding and filling, rinse and repeat. We finally finished with the keel and the bottom and she looks great. Yesterday we gave the boat a good scrub to get rid of the last black dust from the sandblasting. Today was rainy so all we did was clean some more and tape off for the barrier coats. If the weather improves tomorrow we will paint!

Hauled out!

Yes, the boat is that big and my wife is that cute.

Friday, Sept. 5, was a historic day for Oceanus. It was the first time she left the dock under her own power since 2005. That was the year she was trucked up from California. Jason and I took her up river to the Yaquina River Boatyard for a long overdue haulout.

The engine and new prop performed well and we motored into the slipway with no drama. It was a great comfort having Jason along. He knows the engine well and was constantly checking on things. He's also great company and a very competent hand.

There were no big surprises when the boat came out of the water -- another blessing. She looks good for a middle-aged beauty. No blisters, although her iron keel needs a lot of work.

Sanding bottom paint off the bootstripe. I know barnacles sometimes attach themselves to the boot, but bottom paint should remain on a boat's bottom. Use a scrub brush now an then.  

Here's what we've done so far:

• Pressure washed the bottom,
• Sanded the entire topsides with 80 and 150 grit,
• Removed three unused plastic through hulls and a vent in the transom area,
• Filled and fiberglassed the remaining holes,
• Pulled her 60-foot mast,
• Sanded and epoxied the spreaders,
• Filled about a dozen small (less than dime sized) dings. 

Unless you've hauled out a boat this size you might think we haven't done much. If you think that you are WRONG! This big boat is kicking our butts big time. We come home so tired we can't even talk. We shower the dust off our sore bodies and fall into bed. The next morning we do it again. But we are happy with the progress and excited for the big payoff next week when she gets painted with Awlgrip paint.

We sanded down to the original gelcoat cove and bootstripes. The cheap plastic throughhulls in the stern are history too.

One exciting thing for me is sanding off all the stupid stripes someone painted on most likely in the 1990s. Once we got rid of them and sanded the bottom paint off the bootstripe, the beauty of the hull came alive. We plan on painting her like she was originally, but with black boot and cove stripes, instead of navy blue.

It's been a tough few weeks for the Oceanus crew

We've had a tough month and a half. We completely moved out of our house, which meant giving away, selling or throwing away a lifetime's worth of junk. That was harder than we anticipated. We also moved (mostly) on to Oceanus, which my wife made look easy. Amazingly she found places for our pared down belongings and about three months of food and still had space left over. The sale of our house has been a real roller coaster. The closing date has changed so many times I lost track. In the middle of all this Virginia needed a root canal.

Oceanus's new prop.

Consequently, Virginia and I felt like throwing up most of the time.

Of course a lot of good things happened during those weeks as well. We could not have survived without a lot of help from friends, family and neighbors. Our real estate agent, Carl, provided much support and guidance through, what he admits, is one of the worst transactions he's ever handled in his long career. Our neighbors were great help, especially my woodworking buddy Ray. Our kids came with a moving van and filled it with furniture and other housewares we no longer wanted, but they did. Neighbor Salanda kept us in delicious fresh tomato sandwiches after Virginia cleaned out the kitchen. My Turkish friend, Senar, stripped a teak door for the head in Oceanus. He also reminded me that all Abrahamic religions teach the virtue of patience. Thanks, Senar, I needed that.

Dave and Joi Hess once again came through for us in a pinch. They allowed us to live in their little guest house while Oceanus is torn apart during moving and hauled out. The boatyard doesn't allow people to live aboard their boats while their boats are hauled out.

We also received a huge amount of help on the boat. First and foremost was Oceanus's previous owner Jason. He helped me get the engine running and pulled me out of more tight spots than I can name in the past few weeks. He rebuilt the engine when he owned it, but there were still some issues with the raw water pump and the propeller, among other things. He helped me sort through those and was jolly on the spot when I ran into trouble. I can't express how amazing he has been. We couldn't have done it without you Jason! Having cute Ellie around was a bonus.

Lance, the diver, and John of West Coast Propeller deserve special mention too. Lance came back three different times to get the old prop off Oceanus and install the new one. He was a trooper and way more patient than we had a right to expect. We finally found the perfect prop at West Coast Propeller for Oceanus and her Perkins 4.108 diesel engine. It was used, but after John, the owner, trued it up it looked and sounded new. Each of her three blades rang like a bell with the same pitch.

When we look back at this time it is the many kind and helpful people we will remember, not the sore backs and frustration.

Project progress on our Columbia 43

We bent on the mainsail so we could try on the new mainsail cover Virginia sewed. It fits great! You can also see the new hatch I made and a shade cover for the dodger window.

Just a quick update on a few projects aboard Oceanus. My wife sewed up a storm over the last few weeks. Her largest project so far, at least in yards of canvas used, is the new mainsail cover. She ordered a kit from our friends at SailRite hoping it would work.  We had a mainsail cover from a mystery boat that sort of fit so between the two she made one and it is close to perfect.

A close look at the shade cover for the dodger window. It's made out of Sunbrella Panorama View, which you can't get anymore.

Virginia made this oversized pillow out of left over foam from the bunks. It will be great as a backrest in the cockpit. She also made sheet bags for the traveler adjustment lines.

She made more pillows for the interior. My favorite features a beautiful cross stitch sampler she made for me as a gift about 25 years ago. The bolster pillows feel great when you put them behind the small of your back.

I made this medicine chest from mahogany using dovetails for the case and mortise and tenon joinery for the door. I had my glass guy put a vinyl backing on the mirror for safety. 

Here you can see the dovetails.

More dovetails, in teak this time, for the replacement hatch. The lens is of 3/8-inch polycarbonate from TAP Plastics.

The new washer and dryer aboard Oceanus. They came from three different sources.

A mystery dinghy for my Columbia 43

The new mystery dinghy for Oceanus. By the way, the cooler was heavy, its not just my butt that's making her down in the bow. Which begs the question, "Does this dingy make my butt look fat?"

I bought a mystery dinghy for my Columbia 43 Oceanus. I've been looking for a Minto or one of the small Gig Harbor Boat Works dinks, or a Fatty Knees for a tender. When I saw an ad on Craig's List I thought from the bad photos it was a Minto. It's not. Mintos are 9 feet 1 inch. This boat is 8 feet 6 inches on the nose.

This boat has no maker's mark or builder plate. It also does not have a U.S. Coast Guard hull identification number molded in the stern, which makes me think it was built before 1972 when HINs became mandatory. It was undoubtedly professionally built and has molded in lapstrakes. The boatbuilder knew what he was doing, he spiled the planks so they look just right.

It has a fairly deep keel for a dinghy and a generous skeg which makes it track well and easy to row. I rowed in a fairly strong crosswind without a problem. She is so much fun to row that I found excuses to row her, like rowing the garbage to the head of the dock instead of walking. The keel will make it a little tippy after landing on a beach, but the great directional stability is worth it.

It weighs between 80 and 90 pounds. I can carry it fairly easy onto my shoulder and carry it to the water. I can also lift it into the back of my pickup alone, but a helping hand is always welcome.

There is plenty of room on Oceanus's foredeck for a hard dinghy of this size. Using a spinnaker halyard and the spinnaker pole, it shouldn't be too difficult to bring her aboard.

It came with the fancy stainless hardware to mount it on the swim step of a trawler yacht. I took it off and it's available to any blog reader who wants it. My guess is that the dinghy spent most of its life decorating the stern of a sea pig.

I bought 8-foot oars. Shorter ones would work, but the eights feel great. I love to row this boat!

It needs some work: the teak on the gunnels is beat up and cracked in two places and most of the screw plugs are missing in action. There are no quarter knees or  a breasthook, which makes it look a little funny to my eye. It also needs paint and filling the holes left by the fancy hardware I took off. I have more pressing projects aboard Oceanus, so these projects may have to wait until we are in the Sea of Cortez.

The good news is I bought it for $150. The bad news is I went to West Marine after and spent $195 on these two wood club things they claim are oars and some oarlocks. The oarlocks look passable, but I may have to do some whittling on the oars before I can stand to look at them. I bought 8-foot oars, 7 or even 6 foot would have worked, but the eights feel great and they'll be long enough to stand and scull.

So, what do you think I have? Who made this little gem? I've been looking around on the web and nothing seems to fit. There's a good article on Cruising World's web site about dinghies, but all the fiberglass ones with lapstrakes in this article are the wrong size.

She doesn't spin like a flat-bottomed pram, but she's still very maneuverable.

Shop time: finishing touches for our Columbia 43

Making joints in the shop. On top is a dovetailed hatch frame, which is sitting on the medicine chest for the head. Next to them are the rails and stiles of the medicine chest door, which will be put together with mortice and tennon joints.

Lately I've been spending more of my boat-work time off the boat and in my garage shop. My goal is to finish the last bits of unfinished storage: a medicine chest for the head and six drawers for under our bunk.

These will be made primarily with dovetail joints. It's the best joint for the job, they look fantastic and, once I get going, I really like cutting them. There's nothing like getting it right and having the joint go together with a piston fit. Sometimes I get so excited that I call my neighbor Ray over as a witness. Once the joint is glued together the moment is gone for ever.

Ray is a great friend and a great woodworker. He spent most of the previous Saturday helping me resaw and plane what seemed like hundreds of board feet of mahogany and maple for the doors and drawers. That is just plain hard work. You can understand why master cabinetmakers assigned their apprentices that task.

Some of the mahogany and maple Ray helped me mill.

We ended up with a nice stickered pile of beautiful lumber in the thicknesses I needed and half a pickup load of wood shavings and cut offs.

This weekend, while I was in the dovetailing mood, I also cut the joints for a new hatch frame for Oceanus. The old one was an ill-fitting replacement made of cheap mahogany that had gone to rot. The new one is of teak and will fit perfectly.

I bought the teak several months ago and I've been working up the courage to make a hatch out of it. If I botch any part of it I'm out about $100 for the wood, not to mention my time driving to Portland to buy it and then making it. I'm much more fearless butchering the African mahogany I use on interior projects, which I can usually get locally for $4.50 a board foot. The teak costs $27 a board foot and I must drive two hours one way to get it. That's six times as expensive, if my feeble math skills are correct.

Oceanus has seven hatches. Two of them I built and four others I rebuilt. All the latter were rotten and leaked. The largest hatch in the forepeak seems to be in good order and is original to the boat. I may yet replace it, but it's low on the list of things to do.

New non-skid for the decks of our Columbia 43

Weeks of hard prep work finally pays off as Virginia applies the first coat of our non-skid.

Weeks of hard work on her knees last fall finally paid off when Virginia rolled on special non-skid paint on the deck of Oceanus last weekend. The decks look beautiful! To my eye they look even better than new.

When Oceanus came out of the Columbia Yachts yard in Costa Mesa back in 1971 she had robin-egg blue non-skid areas with off-white water channels surrounding them. I'm sure they looked groovy just a couple years after The Summer of Love. Over the years the decks were pierced with vents and deck gear that now are long gone. They were beat up and painted two or three times, first with grey then with white paint. By the time we purchased the boat the decks were an ugly mess.

Worse still, all that paint filled in the texture of the molded in non-skid pattern making it unsafe. For two or three days each week for several weeks last fall Virginia was on her knees stripping off the old paint with Citristrip and wire brushes and lots of elbow grease digging down to the original robin-egg blue, diamond-patterned non-skid. It was a lot of hard work: she came home beat. It was also a classic it-looks-worse-before-it-looks-better project. Way worse.

Oceanus's deck taped and ready for non-skid.

When she finished the stripping and sanding, she painted two coats of white Brightsides polyurethane paint in the water channels bordering the non-skid areas. Things started looking better. But just when she was ready for the big payoff -- painting the non-skid -- the Northwest rains descended. Since October there hasn't been the three days in a row of good weather she needed to apply the special non-skid paint. That changed a couple of weeks ago and things started looking better.

Before she started this project last year Virginia researched several non-skid paint options and finally decided to use a coating called Ecoprocote Eco-Tuff Flex Formula Fine Aggregate in the wheat color. It's a low-VOC, high-traffic, rubberized non-skid industrial floor coating that has ground-up recycled tennis balls to make it grippy. The makers, Eco Safety Products, describe it as "The highest quality 100% Acrylic emulsion and Urethane dispersion with advanced bio-based technology that offers outstanding abrasion, hot tire pick-up, chemical, water, and weather resistance for interior or exterior use. It is a breathable self sealing, uniquely hard yet resilient rubberized non-skid coating that waterproofs, protects, and provides a non-aggressive barefoot friendly texture." I think it was the barefoot-friendly texture that sold us.

Virginia applies the special primer for the Eco-Tuff non-skid coating.

The special primer for the Eco-Tuff looks like skimmed milk, goes on thin and drys tacky. Virginia had half a gallon left over when she finished coating all of the boat's non-skid areas. The non-skid coats must be applied within 48 hours of laying down the primer.

The cockpit get's its first coat of non-skid. The teak strips on the sole of the cockpit are taped off.

The final coats are about the consistency of thinned oatmeal and must be stirred well every time before filling the paint tray. The stirring part is important to get a consistent look to the surface. To apply it you need a special roller cover you can buy from the Ecoprocoat folks. (The coating is water soluble so cleaning the roller between coats is not hard. We bought three roller covers just in case.) This stuff goes on thick so it doesn't go very far. Two gallons of the final coating covered two coats on the non-skid areas of the deck and in the cockpit. We ordered a third gallon so we can apply a third coat as recommended for high-traffic areas.

After two coats of non-skid Virginia removes the tape.

We struggled with the color selection. We didn't want something too dark that would be hot in the tropics but we also wanted something that was easy on the eyes. The Wheat color turned out to be the right choice for us: not too dark and it looks good with the color of the canvas and bullworks. They didn't offer it in groovy robin-egg blue -- not that we would have picked that.

The best part about the new non-skid is way it feels. Your footing is secure both with bare feet and while wearing our Keens (the best shoes and sandals you can buy, in our opinion). In bare feet it feels soft and a little squishy, like the soft matts sometimes used in children's play areas or the running surface on a high-tech track. The Eco-Tuff folks also claim it has some insulative qualities, which won't hurt when the sun is beating down on Oceanus's huge deck.

Beautiful decks at last!

 

We couldn't be happier with how it looks and feels. Now we will wait to see how it holds up during actual use. Here's hoping Virginia's hard work pays off long term.