Sometimes you just have to stop what you are doing and switch to something else and that is exactly what we did.
We had an errand to run prior to going to Akupara this morning, we dropped off the 2 scuba tanks that were on board when we bought her to see if they were still good. 1 was toast but one passed the internal visual and appears to be salvageable so we left it to be hydro tested and have new seals installed. Of course since we went in with 2 tanks there was no way I could leave without 2 tanks so I purchased a good used one that passed visual and hydro last month. We pick up the original one next weekend.
So when we arrived at Akupara we just weren’t in the mood to fight with nuts and bolts on deck fittings so we changed things up and began dismantling the interior starting in the v-berth.
Behind the ceiling in the v-berth |(ceiling refers to the wood slats that are on the sides of the v-berth) we found 40 years of dust dirt and grime. I don’t think anyone has ever tried to clean behind it before and it is so black that the only way I can think to clean it off is to pressure wash it, so as soon as we have all the rest of the interior out, that is exactly what we will do.
We also marked out the areas on deck that we will need to re-core and we did 2 test spots with the belt sander to see exactly how hard it is going to be to sand it down. Thankfully, it seemed to go fairly well and in 15 minutes I had about 3 square feet sanded down quite nicely with 80 grit.
Tomorrow we will try to resume the removal of the deck fittings.
We have also decided to take out stock in a stainless steel screw company as we have probably discarded a full bucket of screws by now and will need to replace all of them. 😉