Still struggling with the caprail. More then half done, but some complications not thought about before makes progress slow.
Caprail is all there is in my life right now
I wake up and start measuring and sanding and I fall asleep with the wood dust still in my eyes. Working on the caprail is even more tougher then beating in 25 knots of winds.
When I beat in those rough conditions the only thing I have to do is wipe up the salty water inside what is coming through the caprail-leaks. Not too bad compared to sanding and sawing and measuring on a hot boat full of dust everywhere.
Here you see the inner and outer hull with some grayish stuff in between. That grayish stuff is the most important, it is the epoxy with polyester-mat and some thickener to close the gap between the two cores. This is the unsanded rough bottom where the wood comes on top.
The inner-hull a nice channel and the outer hull. This still has to be filled. A small complexity of the GPS-wire and the stanchions.
A jury rig with a Spanish windlass (?) to keep the stanchions in place and the GPS-wire in one piece. (I did not have the guts to feed the wire one more through the stanchions, so I just cut the wood and glued it together. How nice epoxy can be for clumsy people like me).
Finally after all this is over I hope to be able to report that we have a dry boat. Even when there are tropical thunderstorms poring down or beating in the wind with the caprail kissing the waves. Nothing is more demoralizing on a boat in bad weather to discover that your books get salty or—months later—that your CD’s have all the same fungus disease so that they are unreadable.
I’m not complaining, because it is the most important job of a sailor. To keep the water where it belongs, outside of the boat and under the keel.
See all the articles about caprail.
