Painting Project:Part One

The gel-coat on Loomba-Loomba had a lot of imprfections, mostly on the cabin and deck surfaces.  Lots of hairline surface cracks, a few large spiderweb-like cracks through non-skid areas.  Domingo is fixing it all.  Some very meticulous work here! With a dremel tool, he digs out the bad spots, then uses an epoxy filler, then sands smooth.  This requires a lot of patience, and a lot of close inspection in the right light conditions.  

You can see in the pictures that some substantial areas of non-skid have been completely ground off.  Here he will epoxy down matching sheets of non-skid fabricated out of fiberglass with the raised 3/16” squares molded in gel-coat.  The non-skid areas will be Awlgripped in a slightly different color than the smooth areas, and it will be applied with a roller to achieve a thicker film.  Everything else gets sprayed.

First coat is a high build primer, requiring sanding.  This helps to better fill minor surface imperfections, and also helps to stabilize the gel-coat.  On top of the high build primer goes the Awlgrip epoxy primer, then the topcoat Awlgrip. 

Fisheries Supply, with Awlrip’s instruction and specs, mixed a custom blue, for the boot and sheer stripes.  This will undoubtedly become a very popular color.  Awlgrip named it Loomba Blue.  Hull, deck, and cabin are ‘Off-White Revisited’.  Non skid will be a shade darker by adding a little black pigment.  It’s a daunting job.  We’re thankful Domingo has such attention to detail.

Meanwhile, the boat is an atrocious mess.  Everything had to be stripped off the boat, and it is all down below, stuffed in every available space.  Consequently it is hard for us to get to anything, or to make much headway with our own projects.  Chrissy is working on re-varnishing high traffic areas in the galley.  Jim removed the old windlass and is creeping along toward installing the new one.  We also have a third solar panel to install, and a storm trysail track to put on the mast.  We’ve managed to bring a few little projects here to the rented condo and are puttering away at getting something accomplished, IN AN AIR CONDITIONED SPACE!

We forgot to take down our Mexican flag before we left -
it took a beating!

The whisker pole and the dodger take up most
of the space in the main cabin.

Sails and windvane take up the forward cabin.

Jerry jugs and fenders take up the head.

Hurricane Paul went by the other day, out on the West coast of Baja.  We were fine…temps actually dropped down into the 70’s, and we had several days of intermittent rain.  We hope everyone on the East side of the Baja Peninsula faired OK.  We heard Puerto Escondido survived with 50 knots of wind, but some docks were damaged in Santa Rosalia.