I'm so glad I stumbled upon your blog and am enjoying browsing through it. You write beautifully and on subjects I can easily relate to…varnish, for instance.
As a boat captain for 18 years and another 15 years of repairing and restoring boats I've laid on a few 55-gallon drums-worth of varnish and paint myself. I vividly remember one afternoon in New Orleans when I'd just finished the last brush stroke of varnish on the rails of the 65' Hatteras Motor Yacht I was running and every love bug in south Louisiana decided to pay a visit. Sanding out the craters their little bodies left behind was…well, you've been there.
And I'll never forget the morning a friend of mine and I were doing an Awlgrip roll and tip job on his 60 foot classic ketch (built in Scotland in 1915). The boat was in the water at a dock on the edge of an empty lot on the New River in Fort Lauderdale. We were within a couple of feet of finishing off the starboard side of the boat when, for some unknown reason, I looked behind me to see that a gust of wind at our backs was sending a wall of dead leaves, grass cuttings, bugs and dirt our way. There is absolutely NOTHING you can do or say other than “oh, sh*t” and wait for the stuff to hit and stick. Job security at its finest.
With that background, when I bought my beloved Kaiser26, that I named Nancy Dawson (the name of the tune to which the rum ration was piped in the British Navy for over 200 years) and which I single-handed on a nine-month cruise to Mexico, Belize and the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, I figured it would take me a minimum of 40 hours a year to keep the teak toe rails, hatches and trim bright and shiny with varnish.
Since no one was going to pay me for a week's worth of varnish work each year, coupled with the fact that I'd rather spend that week kicked back in a hammock somewhere exotic, I decided to paint everything.
I stripped down to bare wood and then laid down two coats of thinned-out varnish as a sealer and two more coats of varnish as a base coat. I then put on two coats of single-part poly; the toe rail in a light gray that contrasted beautifully with the fire engine red hull and the trim in a nice buff. Five years later everything was still bright and shiny and I had all that free time to do something more enjoyable.
The reason for laying on the varnish first was to keep the paint from soaking into the wood. Then, when I finally sold the boat if the new owner was a varnish freak it would be easy for them to strip down to bare wood again.
oldsalt,
Anyone who's endured lovebug trauma is a friend of mine! Personally, I've always preferred to let them harden into the varnish. Then, I break their little legs, toss the carcasses and sand out whatever remains. I've never done any rolling and tipping because I work by myself and generally choose my boats accordingly, but size doesn't matter at all when it comes to “texturing” varnish. Boatyards are one thing, but working in fancy yacht clubs means the yard crew from hell always is around, ready to do their damage. If there isn't dust there's pollen – and after Ike, it was just gruesome for months. We didn't have any rain to speak of for at least three or four months, and all of the mud left from the surge turned into dust. It was bad.
My favorite addition to a coat of varnish was the prints from the feet of a love-crazed mallard. He was after his lady-love and landed on a cockpit coaming. Two webbed feet hardened up, pretty as you please. What it did to his feet I'm not sure – probably peeled off eventually. The owner was so taken with his unusual decoration he asked me to leave the prints as conversation pieces.
I was really interested in what you had to say about the painting. I have a friend who's preparing to head down island in a year or so, and he's been thinking about painting to minimize upkeep. I'll send him your paragraph, and that should be all the instruction manual he needs. I've never done any painting save the window frames on a couple of Grand Banks, but I once stripped a transom when the new owner wanted to change the boat's name. The old name had been beautifully hand-painted, but it was painted directly onto the transom's bare wood. What a mess! Not only did the paint not want to come out of the wood, once the paint was gone, the shadow of the name took forever to disappear. Now the boat itself is disappeared, gone in Ike. But I learned a lot of lessons with her!
Of course I could go on forever, but I won't. Enjoyed your comments, and the useful tip!
{ 3 comments }
Valk Vitesse 48: 2 x volvo penta tamd72a diesel Steel motoryacht Vandervalk Vitesse 48, "Brightness",…
I'm so glad I stumbled upon your blog and am enjoying browsing through it. You write beautifully and on subjects I can easily relate to…varnish, for instance.
As a boat captain for 18 years and another 15 years of repairing and restoring boats I've laid on a few 55-gallon drums-worth of varnish and paint myself. I vividly remember one afternoon in New Orleans when I'd just finished the last brush stroke of varnish on the rails of the 65' Hatteras Motor Yacht I was running and every love bug in south Louisiana decided to pay a visit. Sanding out the craters their little bodies left behind was…well, you've been there.
And I'll never forget the morning a friend of mine and I were doing an Awlgrip roll and tip job on his 60 foot classic ketch (built in Scotland in 1915). The boat was in the water at a dock on the edge of an empty lot on the New River in Fort Lauderdale. We were within a couple of feet of finishing off the starboard side of the boat when, for some unknown reason, I looked behind me to see that a gust of wind at our backs was sending a wall of dead leaves, grass cuttings, bugs and dirt our way. There is absolutely NOTHING you can do or say other than “oh, sh*t” and wait for the stuff to hit and stick. Job security at its finest.
With that background, when I bought my beloved Kaiser26, that I named Nancy Dawson (the name of the tune to which the rum ration was piped in the British Navy for over 200 years) and which I single-handed on a nine-month cruise to Mexico, Belize and the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, I figured it would take me a minimum of 40 hours a year to keep the teak toe rails, hatches and trim bright and shiny with varnish.
Since no one was going to pay me for a week's worth of varnish work each year, coupled with the fact that I'd rather spend that week kicked back in a hammock somewhere exotic, I decided to paint everything.
I stripped down to bare wood and then laid down two coats of thinned-out varnish as a sealer and two more coats of varnish as a base coat. I then put on two coats of single-part poly; the toe rail in a light gray that contrasted beautifully with the fire engine red hull and the trim in a nice buff. Five years later everything was still bright and shiny and I had all that free time to do something more enjoyable.
The reason for laying on the varnish first was to keep the paint from soaking into the wood. Then, when I finally sold the boat if the new owner was a varnish freak it would be easy for them to strip down to bare wood again.
oldsalt,
Anyone who's endured lovebug trauma is a friend of mine! Personally, I've always preferred to let them harden into the varnish. Then, I break their little legs, toss the carcasses and sand out whatever remains. I've never done any rolling and tipping because I work by myself and generally choose my boats accordingly, but size doesn't matter at all when it comes to “texturing” varnish. Boatyards are one thing, but working in fancy yacht clubs means the yard crew from hell always is around, ready to do their damage. If there isn't dust there's pollen – and after Ike, it was just gruesome for months. We didn't have any rain to speak of for at least three or four months, and all of the mud left from the surge turned into dust. It was bad.
My favorite addition to a coat of varnish was the prints from the feet of a love-crazed mallard. He was after his lady-love and landed on a cockpit coaming. Two webbed feet hardened up, pretty as you please. What it did to his feet I'm not sure – probably peeled off eventually. The owner was so taken with his unusual decoration he asked me to leave the prints as conversation pieces.
I was really interested in what you had to say about the painting. I have a friend who's preparing to head down island in a year or so, and he's been thinking about painting to minimize upkeep. I'll send him your paragraph, and that should be all the instruction manual he needs. I've never done any painting save the window frames on a couple of Grand Banks, but I once stripped a transom when the new owner wanted to change the boat's name. The old name had been beautifully hand-painted, but it was painted directly onto the transom's bare wood. What a mess! Not only did the paint not want to come out of the wood, once the paint was gone, the shadow of the name took forever to disappear. Now the boat itself is disappeared, gone in Ike. But I learned a lot of lessons with her!
Of course I could go on forever, but I won't. Enjoyed your comments, and the useful tip!
Linda
Change we can believe in. What a joke.
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