Lots of work but little obvious progress on Petrel over the last few weeks. What started as an effort to refinish the pilothouse window frames has expanded to include wooding and refinishing the pilothouse and trunk cabin, which in turn has led to a project to refasten the trunk cabin sides. I am not, as it turns out, doing a very good job of limiting the scope of each task! As always each decision to do “just a little bit more” made perfect sense in the moment and it’s only after the dust settles that I can look around and say “what did I do now!?”
To recap: I wanted to strip and refinish the varnished pilothouse window frames. A reasonable enough beginning. And then, once I was engaged in stripping that area, it just made sense to go a bit further and strip the paint around the window frames as well, since it badly needed to be done. But the trunk cabin sides were in even worse shape, and with the end of summer on the horizon I thought that I would just continue and wood the entire structure so I could paint it all at the same time.
That plan went fine for the first few days, and the cabin is now almost completely wooded.
But in stripping the trunk cabin I found several structural problems that immediately became the top priority. The fastenings holding the cabin to the deck are failing, allowing the cabin sides to bulge out in a couple of spots and there were other problems besides. The whole situation is laid out in detail on the WoodenBoat Forum Petrel restoration thread.
All of that repair work really needed to be done before proceeding with refinish work since any new paint would inevitably be damaged by pulling the cabin back into place and refastening. So here we are. Deep in the thick of fasteners and various schemes to force everything back into the right shape. And this morning I awoke to the sound of the first full-on downpour we have had since June at least.
Petrel in the rain
Summer in Seattle is officially over, and with it my window for painting outside. Sure, there will still be nice days and it may be still possible to get the finish work done before winter but that’s a secondary goal at this point. Right now I’m just trying to finish the structural work. And starting to think about tarps and tents.
F/V Petrel 