Decking!

I actually worked on the boat today. There has just been a lot going on in the household, so much so that working on the boat wasn't even a remote possibility. In a weird way, the impossibility of spending time on the boat made it easier to accept. At no point did I hope to work on the boat only to have those hopes crushed as reality made itself known, again.

I started working the forward deck. And now that I have spent some time thinking about this, I'm happy I started this now, while I still have some in-the-bow tasks yet to complete.  This is what I mean. Today I finished epoxy coating the lazarette floor which means the only things left inside the bow are wiring and flotation. Those things will take a few days, running around buying stuff, installation, epoxy coating etc. That is ok since the deck will take a few days too. I rough cut the outside today (before picture below).

But still have a few days, since there is two sides of epoxy coating to do, hole putty filling, and re-drilling to get done. To do the rough trim I made a little scribe tool as shown below.

In the past I would have just chewed my way to the hull by taking progressively smaller bites out of it using the Fein tool.  The problem is that this is time consuming, and the more time something takes, the more likely I am to take a shortcut (in this case the short cut is taking too-big blind bites), and any short cut inevitably leads to mistakes.  With the scribe lines in place I could use the jig saw with confidence.  I drilled the locations for all this stuff.

Next will be to add backers and/or t-nuts as appropriate to to the deck superstructure, while adding epoxy coats the the deck.  The hope now is that I can finish the wiring and installing flotation without unduly delaying the deck installation.

I know the concept of schedule doesn't mean much for this project.  I think it is just my need to be time-efficient that I am addressing by trying to parallel path different aspects of this build