Boat projects the past couple weekends included finishing sanding the cabinets and painting the cabinets. I only had the front half of the boat to sand so I hung a tarp, opened a hatch and some ports, donned my dust mask and dove in. What a dusty mess! But I did it and it’s done. Next, I mixed TSP (trisodium phosphate) with some water and scrubbed the cabinet insides. There’s nothing worse than cleaning someone else’s gunky residue out of your cabinets. Well, there are probably a few things worse than that, but this weekend, there was nothing worse!
The epoxy paint we’re using dries uber hard, but it takes several days to completely harden and dry. So I was only able to do about one coat per weekend. I tested the epoxy paint on the weird vinyl liner on the hull and it appears to be ok. The vinyl is a lot duller than the fresh paint and it’s really noticeable now. Plus, it’s gotten scuffed, stained, and just generally grimy over the years and it really needs to either be painted over or removed. It’s glued to the hull and really hard to remove. Removing it involves replacing it with something else which sounds like way too much work. In some of the larger cabinets we’re planning to insulate the hull over the top of the vinyl and then most likely covering the insulation with white, smooth FRP (fiberglass reinforced plastic) sheets, but there is a lot of exposed vinyl liner that would require itty bitty precision cuts to fit FRP over the top and that’s just not going to happen. So painting the vinyl liner will have to do the trick.
Lately, every time I go to the Delta I see something I haven’t seen before. A couple days ago I saw a Great Blue Heron catch a significantly sized fish and swallow it whole. I realize that birds don’t have teeth, but this fish looked seriously bigger than the bird’s throat. Today it was a herd of sheep blocking traffic on the levee road. I was painting down below and heard a loud noise outside. I thought it was a noisy flock of birds flying over, but it turned out to be a herd of sheep and lambs and dogs. I’ve noticed that the herd of sheep periodically pops up in different fields around the marina. Evidently they walk them from field to field using trucks, quads and dogs. There were two really big white dogs (Great Pyrenees I think) at the front of the herd and several Border Collies at the back nipping heels and keeping the sheep in line. There was even a Border Collie puppy working along with the adults. A few cars were stuck behind the herd with no way around. Anyway, I thought it was interesting so I took a couple photos and a short video.
