I’ve got coats and coats of varnish on the brightwork. Still building up to my magic 8 coats! I’m at about 6 most places, some places 8.

Its been cold and a bit overcast whenever I’ve had time to do another coat. Oh, but today is bright and sunny. So…I just sanded and put another coat on all the tedious parts of the cockpit (edges of seats and along the edge of the bridgedeck, etc).

It was looking soooo good–for about 5 minutes and then a huge wind came up outta nowhere, picked up some wood chips from below the boat (in the boatyard) swirled them around and dumped them right in the cockpit . I now have wood-chip antiskid all over my wet varnish.

ARGH!!!!! I cried while I tried to vacuum up the damage (which only took chips from the dry places in the cockpit, not the wet varnish) and then walked away…

I snapped a couple pics, it doesn’t look as bad as it really is, believe me its worse than it looks–my camera doesn’t do close ups…the varnish work was on narrow strips of mahogany between painted ply or painted canvas (on bridge deck, for example).

Another ugly shot, this one at the back of the seat where there’s a water channel. Now all covered in chips:

Now for some “pretty shots” of brightwork that isn’t covered in chips:

Here you can see some of the covering board, cockpit combing, and inside the cockpit you can glimpse those narrow bits of wood that are now covered in chips and dust. In the pic, David is working on re-install of the worm gear before buildout of the steering box around it.

In this pic you can see the bright insides of the bulwarks, covering board:

This corner is about to have a big “gun port” type scupper cut into the bulwark as the two tiny drains are not going to hack it alone, btw…Close up of the corner of the raised deck an bulwark which are both bright.