Ready for varnish!
All started wrong.
I went to boatyard with a headache and everything was falling on my head: ladder, wood bits, tools. It is good that I was alone, nobody got disturbed by heavy cursing and multiple kitchen-latin expressions.
I tried focusing on small jobs first, to gain control over my head.
I cut and shaped battery mount from thick plywood. Routed water escapes on the bottom, where it will meet stem timber.
After small adjustments it fits nicely in this part of the bilge.
Since bow timber is abruptly going up in this section I need to rest one end of this shelf at the foot of floor timber. This way I can have batteries sitting levelled. Water escapements match channels in the floor piece.
Battery which sits foremost will need 8cm spacer, to rise it high enough for width clearance between narrowing freeboard. I’ll fix it in the workshop and then the whole assembly will be coated with epoxy.
Due to persevering headache I left toilet mount designing for later and went out, to finish sanding whaledeck.
This shaped, rounded part of my boat is best sanded by hand. I would not dare to approach it with machine - too high risk of removing too much in an instant moment. I used 120 and 180-grid paper, to remove a bit more than last few years.
Strange as it sounds - sanding by hand made my headache disappear and calmed me, almost like meditation. I forgot how quick and almost joyful activity it is.
After one hour the job was done.
I removed rudder tiller to work on it in my workshop: I need to wood it and build several varnish levels as the old layers started to peel off. Maybe I should oil it with Owatrol instead? Should be easy to keep an eye on for re-oiling…
The last activity before heading home was washing the whole boat from all the dust acquired after winter. Now she is cleaner and in 1-2 weeks should be dry enough to put new layer of varnish.