Welcome to “From The Helm.” I’m excited to be able to have this forum to ramble on about one of my major passions for anyone out there who wants to listen. Any of you who have been reading my “Restoration Files” feature on the OTW Black Watch knows that I love this stuff.
I found myself this morning at about 6:30 a.m. cutting a hole into my wife’s 18-foot Boston Whaler. Agnes or “Aggie” as she is affectionately known is scheduled for a Memorial Day weekend launch come hell or high water, so I need to carve out time wherever possible to make it happen. Last year I was in the water for a month already. This year the weather really put a damper on things for us. I missed out on three bites already: the squid have come and gone from Nantucket Sound, the first schoolie stripers and blues on the flats have eluded me so far. A little depressing, but that just makes it more important that I launch this weekend. I know some keeper-size bass have moved in!
The hole was a leftover from its days with the boys from the Fishing The East club… you know who you are. Cuttyhunk left its mark on Agnes several times over. Apparently we didn’t locate and fix this hole when we picked it off the salvage heap, and the “bondo” used to fix it must have fallen out when I scraped and prepped the bottom for this season’s bottom paint. By the way while I’m on the subject of bottom paint… check out E-Paint, a local company that makes environmentally friendly paint that, in my opinion, is the best bottom paint going. These days, with copper being so expensive, it doesn’t cost much more money to go with the green alternatives. I picked up Ecominder for this season, and I’ll let you know how it stacks up vs. E-Paint’s ZO-HP product this fall when I pull the boat.
Tonight I’ll grind out the area around the hole, making sure I have clean glass and the gel coat is removed, give it an acetone rub down, and start glassing. Whalers are a little tough in that you can only glass the outside, and to do it right, both sides should be ground out, cleaned and re-glassed on both sides. There was some water intrusion, and that can really screw up a glass repair. I cut out the wet foam and got back to dry, but just in case, I’m going to try a little trick to try and combat the water and keep it at bay while the glass kicks with spray foam that my buddy Ken Antis and I were discussing this morning. I’ll let you know how I make out.