Follow up on Fir Decks

In a much earlier post, I wrote about refinishing the fir decks on our friendship sloop with satin varnish. After a summer that included two boat shows, rafting up with other boats, cruises with dogs, children, multiple adults, and a range of weather let me report on how the decks have held up.
            As a prelude let me say a few more things about cruising with the ship’s wolf. The most important point relating to this post is that our ship’s wolf needs shore leave several times a day. What that means is that wherever we go ashore (often accompanied by children) the elements that make up the shore, mud, sand, or ground seashell, get tracked back aboard no matter how careful we are, and that’s just part of the game.
            Since the very nature of the type of cruising we do dictates a certain amount of wear on the deck finish, I am actually surprised and rather pleased by how well our decks have held up his season. The finish looks very good, and perhaps more to the point, areas of wear are easy to repair with a little light sanding and more varnish.
            I have to say that this fits in very well with our overall maintenance scheme. I don’t mind regular maintenance, if it is easy to do. What I am trying to avoid is the kind of thing that involves toxic solvents and respirators just to do repairs and yearly touch ups.
            By way of contrast, the toe rails of the boat and the spars came to us with a two part synthetic varnish called Bristol Finish. The advantage to this finish is that there is no sanding between coats and it dries into a very hard finish, quite appropriate for toe-rails and spars. However, my experience has been that when Bristol Finish goes bad it goes bad in a big way, totally exposing the wood and allowing moisture to creep underneath the finish and lift in surrounding areas. On the whole, it is a very good product, but is difficult to repair and you need to use a respirator, gloves, and you need to be careful what kind of container you mix it in. With the varnish, I just lightly hand sand and apply another coat: done. So as far as our fir decks are concerned, I am sticking with the varnish, it looks great, has weathered well, and is easy to maintain.

Work or Play?

For the last few weeks, I have been dashing around doing all kinds of stuff, thus the lull in posts. A boat show, then a short cruise, followed by a delivery trip, and now I am preparing to take the boat out of the water.
           In amongst all this slap dashing around the coast I managed to fit in a weekend project that was a bit unusual; I made a model of Peter’s tree house.
           There is a big country fair in central Maine called the Common Ground Fair, Peter was going to be in his own booth selling copies of his award winning book Treehouse Chronicles, which I illustrated. I wanted to create something that would draw people into the booth and get them looking at the book, and I thought that a scale model of the tree house might grab the attention of at least the children at the fair.

         

  
           The model was a lot of fun to make and took roughly two and a half days, then I ran into a little problem; how to move it.
           It took another day to build a crate for the model. In some ways, the crate was the more challenging of the two projects because it needed to be strong, light, I had to figure out a way to secure and protect the model within the crate. Further, I needed to scrounge quite a bit of used plywood to make it. 
           As I worked on these projects, I was struck by how much fun it was building the model and how much building the moving crate felt like a chore. I am not sure why this should be except that making the model was a lot like toy making, and making the moving crate was not. Or, perhaps, it is just about response. The model enchanted children and adults alike, but only my boss commented on the crate.

Biodiesel

I have been looking for an opportunity to try biodiesel, or more accurately a biodiesel mix in the Westerbeke Diesel in our friendship sloop. I have been reading about the pros and cons of this for a long time and had become convinced that it is would be better for the life of our diesel as well as for the environment. In particular I was looking for a 20% biodiesel mix, because, based on what I have read that would not change our winterizing procedures. The only reason that I have not tried it so far is that I have not been able to find a retailer of biodiesel that was not completely out of the way. This season I finally found a retailer of B20 that is right along the drive to our moorings.
Last weekend we put five gallons of 20% Biodiesel in a tank that already had fifteen gallons of regular marine diesel.  I was not expecting a noticeable change because the actual percentage of biodiesel in the tank ended up being about 5%. However, much to my surprise, I noticed that the motor began to run smoother and with less diesel soot. I have to admit being very impressed. I was also impressed while buying the B20 that even though it is four fifths regular diesel, the smell of vegetable oil was noticeable.
The retail price was about $5.00 a gallon, and so far, I am sold. As we finish up our sailing season I intend to replace the remaining regular diesel with the B20 mix.