Top Job

Made some progress.

Drilled holes through the bow and stern for future rope loops to facilitate carrying the boat and securing it on car top roof racks.

Finished the cockpit coaming.

This involved quite a bit of tricky sanding.

At least I had followed Joey's advice regarding the sequence of steps in gluing up and installing the coaming or else the work would have taking a lot longer yet.

And, yeah, I did continue to ponder the hull surface... I'm afraid to admit... it was a bit like a puppy with a slipper... kind of obsessive.

I lost count of how many options I considered: everything for nothing to plain vanilla sheer stripe to bottom only to some kind of Inuit or "First Nations" design or pattern. I certainly did not want anything that interferes with the deck design.

I finally came up with something of a hybrid idea. I am resolved on the bottom of the boat being green. It is the side panel that is in question.

So, I can really picture this slanted transition from solid sea-green along the back sides of the hull then diminishing in ten alternating sections with the varnished okoume to the point of the golden section at which point it will be bright okoume sides. I will not try it unless I feel reasonably sure that I can do it well.

I'll need to check with Joey at CLC and get his input on how to accomplish something like that. He is a real master at this sort of thing and if anyone would know how to do it well, it would be Joey. But, hey, I might decided the do just the bottom and leave the entire side panel bright.

I also finished the job of making the flanges for the soft pad-eyes. After cutting the slot and inserting the strip of webbing, I hot-glued the webbing in place and then dunked the bottom into epoxy.

Though the foam bulk heads will not go in until much later, I took some time and cut out and fitted the rear bulk head. I was curious about cutting and shaping with this huge chunk of  foam.

Not too bad as I discovered.

I have now applied the primer on the bottom panel and after a thorough and rather dusty sanding job we'll be ready for the bottom paint.