Ah, workin’ on my boat… Well, not too much has happened lately, but a big push is about to occur. Two of my best friends arrive in a couple weeks, and they’ve made a lot of big talk about helping with the boat!
In the meantime, i’ve been focussed on the companionway hatch. The sliding hatch itself was pretty much tore down to a few bits of wood; the four basic framing pieces were salvagable, while the planking atop the unit was all scrapped. The hatch garage and attached dodger coaming have been removed, and new pieces made up to replace the rough parts. i’ve sanded the cabintop smooth for a clean mating surface, and drilled out the old screw holes to accept beefy 1/4″ lag screws.
i’ve milled new runners for the hatch slides, and salvaged the funky-looking bronze bearing surface; amazing what muriatic acid and a little wet-sanding will do to renew gunky bronze!
The previous tops to both the hatch and garage were of splined teak planking. The new surfaces will be of West-saturated marine ply, fiberglassed. The drawback to this technique is that it makes it very difficult to get the garage apart later, if needed. The plus side is that, if all goes well, i should never eveer need to!
It’s important to me to have both a hatch and garage that can be stood on with impunity. Too many flimsy ‘glass garages make you second-guess your footing; when you happen to be standing there, wrestling a bouncing boom into the gallows, or setting up the third reef, you don’t want to think about whether the surface you’re standing on is tough enough or not!
The old cabintop grab rails were artfully built running forward out of the dodger coaming, but that left a tight corner at the joint aft where water and gunk looked apt to collect. Also, the grabrails, besides being worn, were too short to let me get my fingers wrapped completely around them. i prefer tall, burly grab rails, tall enough both to grab, but also tall and stout enough to quickly hitch a line around without any struggling. Stowed dinghies, sail-ties, fenders… all will end up lashed to a grab rail eventually, on any boat, so i’m gonna go ahead and build stout, through-bolted steel rails with rough service in mind.
Another big project in the works is the bowsprit. i want an “a-frame” bowsprit; this eliminates whsker stays, and provides a wide, comfortable platform for anchor- and sail-handling. i have a salvaged anchor platform from a Gulfstar 60 that is going to serve as the basis of the construction. The Gulfstar unit is a “U” shape of 2″ stainless tubing, with the body of the “U” filled with a single flat 1/4″ stainless plate. slot-boxes and anchor-rollers are supported by the plate, and the whole is overlain with 1 3/4″ teak. Obviously, waaaaay to heavy. i’ll delete the rollers, the teak, and all of the plate excepting a 1″ tab all around the perimiter of the tubing, then section the tubing and re-weld to turn it from a “U” to a “V”. The footpads will have to be redone to fit my hull shape. i’ll save a lot on labour and materials this way, as the overall size is close, the material is good, and the curves are already bent. To keep the weight down, i’m looking at alternatives to teak planking or grating for the bowsprit infill; fiberglass grating is something that appeals to me.
Centaurea is, frankly, an unusual-looking boat. One advantage of this is that i don’t feel particulary beholden to stick to any certain classic-boat aesthetic; steel grabrails, a-frame bowsprits, and plastic grating wouldn’t seem so out of place on her. The original factory-option bowsprits were of cast aluminum, and the spars are already in fibreglass! For a sailboat, this was all pretty radical, cutting-edge stuff in ’65. My co-worker has a ’72 Bristol 35, and he’s taking great pains to redo all the woodwork and deck fittings in a way that best suits the clean, classic lines of the boat. On the other hand, i feel like i have more of a free hand to experiment and use what construction and materials will give best performance in the long haul.

Sailing back from Smuggler’s this afternoon, i was pleasantly surprised to find the 1928 Fife ketch “Sincerity” in the harbour. What fun!

It’s been a few weeks now of very sporadic internet acccess. Just this afternoon, i’ve been loaned a wifi card, and now, if i perch the computer just right on the pile of Aries spare on the cabintop, i can get onto an unsecured network in a friend’s apartment across the harbour.
My folks have been here visiting for a couple weeks; just left to return to Canada on Friday. Naturally, playing host has cut into boat-fixer-uppering time, but still worth it. Now that they’re off and away, it’s time to get the nose back to the grindstone!
i’ve bought Centaurea a nice little motor (a Universal 18) to replace the hulking rusty Perkins 4-107. Interior work has been progressing; i’m slowly getting through removing, re-bedding, and re-installing the cabin window drip rails, removing the funky fake ceiling strips from turn of the bilge, and generally countersinking & epoxying every chip, ding, and unused screw hole in the inside fiberglass.
Outside, i’ve started in on rebuilding the main sliding hatch, hatch garage, and dodger coaming. Helping with this work is the addition of a whacking Sunbrella awning over the boat; keeps the rain out of the screw holes, and the sun off of me!

Got into the hull this weekend… Being a one-time hurricane write-off, i knew there were repairs to be checked out. After sounding the hull with a hammer, it looked like there was only one area that was showing any cause for concern. The whole bottom had been barrier-coated and bottom-painted, but on the starboard side of the deadwood some of the bottom paint was looking a little crackly, so i suited up and ground off all the paint with a 40-grit softpad.
Having done this on cars and boats before, i wasn’t too shocked to see the usual multi-coloured patchwork of fillers, fairing compound, and patches. After all the paint was off, i dug further with a chisel, chipping off any areas of filler that looked at all loose. There are plenty of dents that were filled, and my impression is that a few were not sanded or prepped well enough before being filled/faired. There are only a handful of spots where damage actually got into the core; the core in these areas was repaired well enough, but the fill and fibreglass mish-mash they used to fair out the damaged outer skin in these ares was too dry. i think this must have been from a single batch of poorly-mixed epoxy; the questionable area covers about one batch’s worth of goop.
The dents can just be froperly faired; the skin is still intact, and the underlaying core foam is solid with no signs of delamination. The fill areas over the patched holes will need amore serious treatment: i’ll grind them back a little more, tapering them into the surrounding skin, then apply a few layers of ‘glass patches to assure outer skin integrity.