Finally got around to painting the cockpit floor

Since the boat's cockpit doubled as a workshop, the floor took a pounding.  Well, I finally broke down and spent the time and energy yesterday to sand and paint it.  I used the Interlux Interdeck nonskid paint.  I ended up using the beige on the boat many years ago and it's worked pretty well.  I went with as light a color as I could, just short of white.  The previous owner painted it gray over baby blue with horrible prep work, so it was peeling.  I fixed this right away by using this bottom paint solvent stripper that was supposed to work on the bottom and didn't.  I tried to get out of spending three days grinding off the old bottom paint, but nope, did it anyway.  So, with this fancy stripper, I painted and stripped the upper deck and painted it with the Interdeck back in 2004 and then wanted to spruce it up after changing some deck hardware which required some repainting, so I repainted the whole thing again several years later.  They changed the color scheme for the paint somewhere in the middle of that time frame, so It's actually slightly darker now, darn it.  I wanted it to be as light as possible so as to reduce the amount of heat it generates below, and not blister your bare feet too.  It's amazing how things heat up in the Florida sun.

Before

During

After

a little work on a beautiful Saturday

Spent the day doing a couple of fun chores.  I screwed on a couple of scraps of starboard, onto the bottom of the bag that hangs from the dinghy's bench seat.  That should elevate it a quarter of an inch and keep things a little dryer.  I also took the basket that came with the refrigerator (that we could never find a really good use for as it didn't work well inside the frig) and it fits inside the bag really well and holds the anchor, the kite, and the bag of lights and whistles and flares nicely and keeps them all together and a little protected against bumping.  I of course pull it out and store it below when we're not on the boat.  You can barely see the plastic in the photos.

Besides that, I put in a larger shim / piece of wood at the base of the companionway so that the hatch boards fit better.  I'm sych'ed about how that's turned out.  It's been several years in the making, but without completely redesigning and rebuilding it, that it's done and good to go, unless I want to put in barn doors.

The last thing I did was swap out the oversized 44 lbs bruce on the bow, with a more proper sized one which is 33 lbs.  I also took out the swivel and went with two shackles, and wired them closed.  Everything will now fit thru the bow roller and not cause me to hang over the bow pulpit and pull the whole thing over the roller, ouch, the back won't take much more of that.

And of course, several other new projects were discovered in the process of doing these three.  Do we ever end up with the perfect boat?