The End is in Sight

School had finished and I had made plans for my first sailing trip. I gave myself a week to finish all of the remaining projects. The daily routine was wake up, drink coffee, jog a few miles, work until 1 or 2 in the morning, pass out from fatigue, and repeat.

I was motivated and had a deadline. A buddy and I had planned to drive her up to Maine and sail for a couple of days, assuming that the boat was going to float.

Back to the work though - 

Kpeting was really stating to look like a boat, but there were tons of annoying jobs that I had been avoiding. One was to remedy the scupper situation. After hours in a West Marine I decided to solve the problem, not to my liking, by employing scuppers and flexible hose. This is by no means a good solution and one project that I will be revisiting. But I needed a fix and for there not to be open holes in my boat.

Second project was to get some wood back in the boat so I could sleep in there. Please note that there is some real irony in this story. One of the major reasons why I originally cut this boat in half was to rebuild a nice interior for her. Having no deck inhibiting my moments I would easily be able to redesign the crappy interior. Oh man did I have dreams!

But as you know, I have all ready glued the boat back together. Fool. So everything that I am doing to get an interior back into the boat can be done with to top on.

Using the old wood as a template.

Shape the wood.

Cut into tiny pieces because I glued the boat back together.

Fit the wood.

For any one of you that knows the inside of a Com-Pac 16 well, you will notice some mods in these pics. Mainly that I use hull stiffeners and wood to rest the bunks onto. I used hull stiffeners and not wood to add integrity and strength to the hull. My plan was to permanently remove and to sail without the, albeit small but structurally important, forward bulkhead and accompanying plywood top. This in turn made me think that I should supplement the hull in some way to compensate for the stiffness that was being lost.

I found some hull stiffeners and epoxied them in.

It was a win win for me because where I placed them allowed me to tack down the bunks in a semi-permanent fashion without having to glass them in. I just figure at some point in the future I will want to replace the plywood (a material that I truly despise) and replace it with real wood. The hull stiffeners will allow me to run boards perpendicular to the stiffeners in a slat like fashion. But for now I was out of time and starting to run out of money at this point of the project.

Paint the wood.

Ah that looks nice. A rough fitting and placement of my new white cedar cabin sole, complete with porta John, was bringing the dream of sleeping on this thing into fruition.