Saturday, December 5, 2015

The Skiff

Found this neat little fiberglass "lapstrake" Whitehall style rowing/sailing skiff a while back on Craigslist. The boat came with trailer, sail rig, oars, and a cover. The fore and aft interior "bulkheads" on the skiff line up perfectly with the davit system that we installed on KamaHele, which was what kind of drew me to this boat despite the slightly rough overall condition. The hull is 11.5 ft long which is just a little shorter than the width of our transom, so there will be no overhang when she is hanging from the transom davits. Based on the amount of built in floatation (the molded shelf running around the interior of the hull) she should stay buoyant even when swamped. I think the boat is early 90s vintage- maybe originally a kit put together by someone with just enough boat knowledge to be dangerous. Of course this is a bit of a fixer upper so I've been working on her "restoration" for the past couple of months. The basic shell was pretty good, but the rest of the fit and finish needed some work:









We started with stripping the boat of all trim and hardware:





Gunnels were re-fastened using copper hardware, and some of the other damaged or poorly installed trim work was fixed and re-installed:













The interior was cleaned up and bad fiberglass work repaired. I also re-enforced the fiberglass lay up where the four lifting points are going and added dry storage compartments fore and aft:









The interior was faired-out a bit, primed, and painted with two coats of single-part polyurethane:







Bottom was cleaned, and primed with two part epoxy paint.
For the finish on the hull, I used a two part polyurethane top coat. Very durable stuff.













I'm not sure that we are going to use any kind of anti-fouling paint on the bottom since the boat is going to be stowed hanging from the transom davits whenever she is not being used:









Next up will be installing the rest of the hardware and fabricating lifting rigging to work with the transom davits.