Stuck on the same thing, the caprail that has to be finished before anything else is going to happen.
Now the caprail even dominates my dreams
Did I tell in the last story that I was working on this caprail from when I opened my eyes until it was too dark to see, the inevitable has happened. I dreamt about it. Well, not exactly about the caprail, but I saw all my electrical tools floating in a kind of bathtub. Maybe this was an allegory on the inside of the boat, but I had this very clear in my head when I woke up.
In my dream I discussed with myself what I should do with those floating tools. Let them dry first or disassemble them first and then let them dry.
One of the big luxuries there are on a boat is the waking up. It goes completely natural, there is no rush to catch a train or a bus, or to rush to the first morning-appointment. No telephones ringing, no paper to read, and I turn the radio off to contemplate what I’m going to do that day.
It is nice cool, the sun is just coming up.
So this image of the floating electrical tools pops up in my head. I look at the work I did on the caprail and slowly sip my coffee. I think to save those tools, you could have used DW40, named after the 40th try to get something that gets rid of the water and oils the instrument.
Better and cheaper is to give the instruments a bath of pure alcohol and let them dry after that, I think, taking another sip of coffee. And then, suddenly I see the ultimate caprail. Just a small change in the design. It will only take a little bit of wood extra and one day of work extra.
I make the decision to go the extra mile, change the design and make the ‘ultimate’ caprail. That’s what I’m working on right now, and the progress is slow but steady. It will be ready to varnish in two days.
Why is this caprail so important?
I want to have a dry boat. The caprail is the element that covers the link between the interior and the exterior hull. If there is water coming in, most of the time it is coming from there and starts dripping down in the most unexpected places.
I’m struggling with this from the first day I bought the boat, 8 years ago. The last owned said that the boat had some small leaks. Together we unscrewed the caprail, cleaned it and put some 8 tubes of 3M-5200 (polysulfite or something close to it) in it before remounting the caprail.
The next time the caprail—originally teak—didn’t survive the operation and I had to use some other kind of wood.
I used all kinds of wrong materials, but now I’m going to seal it completely with epoxy, cloth and wood.
My most extreme reaction has been ‘sell the boat and buy a steel hull’. The most stupid one ‘sail only when the waves are below 4 feet and the wind not more then 15 knots’.
Sometimes it has been so bad, that when we were having the wind on port-side that I would put sponges up on the navigation-table—that is on the starboard side—and clean them every 2 hours.
Most people in fiberglass hulls have leaks and accept it as a kind of nuisiance. They have bigger boats and bigger problems. Freezers that don’t work, electricity-problems and more. IMHO those problems are closely related to leaks.
A dry boat is a heaven on earth.
