It's been months since I updated the blog, but I've been slowly working away on things. One important thing I've been doing is cleaning. There was how-many-years worth of dirt caked on the inside of the hull. That's now been sponged off, which was quite a project. Getting 'way up in the bow was a challenge, even more of a challenge is getting 'way back in the stern! However, I'm well on the way to having completely removed decades of grime. A lot of the loose, flaking paint on the inside of the hull has been sanded off. More remains on the underside of the deck, but there IS progress. After thinking very hard about sailing the Piper on San Francisco Bay, and taking a close look at the Rustler 24, I'm pretty convinced that I will be installing a watertight bulkhead just forward of the mast. That way, if I broach really hard, and put 100 gallons of water in the boat, she might not sink!
Last Winter I covered the boat with a green polypropylene tarp to keep water out of it. Well, the wind and sun destroyed that over the winter, leaving shreds of green and brown plastic everywhere: in the boat, tangled in the rigging and strewn all over the ground. So back in October I decided that I'd be making a solid, permanent and truly waterproof cockpit cover. I wanted to make it big enough that it would cover the cockpit once the mast was up and the boom was rigged, so that took a little bit of figuring. Here's the final result, though.
The Cover is made of a product called "Ottertex", which is a relatively affordable, entirely waterproof and reasonably sun-resistant polyester fabric. I'm writing this blog entry in March 2020 and I actually have not seen the cover since January, so we'll see how it's holding up! I suspect, from some reviews I've read online, that it will still be very strong, but the color may have faded, somewhat.
