Infinite tangents and shower thoughts
Hello! Happy Sunday :)
Today I spent 7 hours helping some friends get their boat to Evesham, and I feel weathered, and raw. But it was a lovely day, and I only fell in the river once.
Back to Monday — I did coat #3 of the orange after 4 hours of taxes, thinking that'd be it. Then I saw the slight patchiness and sighed; coat #4 it was. That evening I then started test-fitting the windows, and EURGH, they're perfect! Unfortunately one of the oddly-shaped ones was wrong, but on Tuesday morning the lovely people of Channelglaze quickly sent a guy out to collect it, which is currently being re-made.
For the rest of the day I screwed in the starboard windows with their primary seal, and then it was a mad rush to put some more white paint on the stern, a first coat on the starboard gunwale, clean the dry dock and get out of there.
I always fear it won't float, like what if the boat just stays on the bottom??? But all was well, I finished at 2230 to moor by the dry dock and went for my glorious cold shower. Here's a little time lapse, with some faffing after filling while I tried to open the gate:
And more on paint chemistry, I learned about the differences between acrylic (solvent-based [which is often water]) and alkyd (oil-based) paints. Specifically, acrylics dry by evaporation, and when it's 25 degrees that happens quickly (the orange was ready to re-coat in an hour). Alkyds also have solvents to help the paint flow, but the main event is oxidation; reacting with oxygen in the air to cure. It ends up harder, but takes longer. The white detail paint I got for the stern & tiller is 16 hours to overcoat, and the black gunwale paint is 24...
On Wednesday morning I set off, stopping after a couple of locks to fit the port windows. I also had the worst surprise for any vessel: a puddle of wet concrete in the middle. The channels down the sides were also full, and I was quickly narrowing down the suspects: not my plumbing, and the water pump wasn't randomly starting to indicate a leak. The sink and shower drain looked fine, and I took the cupboard out from in front of the water tank to find that it too was dry. The engine bay was as dry, it hadn't rained and I hadn't spilled anything. Plus it was litres. Right after exiting the dry dock is SUSS, and I'd done 2 splashy locks before I noticed. Maybe the bathroom sink skin fitting...? The rest were dry.
It didn't take me long to think something had shifted in the dock, and water was seeping in somewhere. It was quite sad, but both sides? Without an obvious cross-over point?
Just kidding, my shower design sucks. I had a splashy one the night before while covered in everything, and after a long back-and-forth with ChatGPT:
that doesn’t scream “hull breach” so much as fluid migration via dumb architecture.
It's me! The dumb architect!
Boats love to gaslight you, and/or I'm a sucker for being gaslit (once bitten, twice shy yanno). Paranoia grabs you quickly and takes a long while to dissipate: next year I'm still getting the hull blasted, epoxied and anode'd to the 9's. What I couldn't get over was the both-sides of water. I just love to overthink.
But the problem remains, shitty architecture. This is the culprit:
I thought a shower screen would take the life out of the area, but I'll make it work. Along that left side until the curve in the curtain rail, and it should slot in there nicely. A friend of mine suggested this a while back, which I dismissed as ugly and absurd, but I rendered a few mockups and I don't hate them.
The rest of Wednesday was wonderful, euphoria that Katona wasn't sinking combined with more Getting Shit Done. Specifically, fixing the port-side windows and starting on their secondary sealant seal.
By the time I've finished, I will have done this masking tape charade 19 times for windows on this boat. But it's oh so worth it:
The time-consuming part is the corners; you can't masking tape the concave outer curve (the inner convex is fine), so you need lots of little pieces. And as Newton and Leibniz observed during their boat rebuilds, you would need infinite strips to make a perfect curve, but in practice 12 is fine.
On Thursday I arrived back in Stratford, then stayed outside of the marina to continue sanding a dusty storm and a touch more painting. I cleaned up the stern on Friday morning, and did a couple of the orange coats before heading back in:
I just love it! And the colour brings me so much joy.
Next week I am looking forward to some recovery, and I still have the gunwales to finish and anti-slip. Also my solar panels arrived, which I was going to wait with until I do the roof but... why? I'll put them up anyway because free electricity.
Until next Sunday!
- Nick