The crane
This entailed a good 45 minutes of fine-tuned movements of the crane. The straps, pictured above, are connected and then slid under both sides of the boat. This can be tricky, especially when the rudder is as far back as ours is. Pulling a boat out with a strap under the rudder could cause some serious damage to the rudder. As it's lowered, large wooden blocks are placed under the center of the hull and a bit of the boat's weight rests on them for stability.
Soup, as it looked when it was first pulled out
Step one was to scrape barnacles off, done pretty much as you would imagine it -- with large paint-scraper-esque poles. A handful of people around the yard joined in, as it's actually kind of fun. Many of the barnacles were still alive, poking their wormy little heads out and grinning wickedly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the boat has been pulled out in at least fifteen years, and thus there were quite a few barnacles.
Barnacle massacre (awesome name for a band, no?)
The next step was to power wash the hull and get all of the mold / fungus / seaweed / etc. off. Again, rather fun, especially in the new orleans heat. Oly and I constantly vied for control of the sprayer.
Oly wins this round.
Right before washing we put the supports (pictured below) on the sides of the boat, and removed the crane by unfastening the straps. Yes, the spots where the supports are remain unsanded and unpainted to this day.
Post-power wash
Post-power wash closeup
As you can see from the two pictures above, the power wash and barnacle scraping made a pretty significant difference (you can actually tell the hull is red!). However, there's obviously still a ways to go before it can be primed and painted. (Queue fun times).
Next step is to sand, sand and sand some more. This amounts to quite a bit of fiberglass and paint chips. Anyone who has worked with fiberglass before will tell you not to fuck around with one of those pussy dust (swine-flu) masks, unless you want to cut a good five years off your life. This alone was worth investing in a respirator, not to mention all the future sanding to be done. I think Oly got the 3M one pictured below for somewhere in the area of $100.
It's hot as hell, but on the plus side you sound like Darth Vader when you use it.
Furthermore, we donned disposable white scrub suits which we grabbed from Oly's employer. This somewhat prevents fiberglass from getting in your skin and itching for days -- but trust me when I say, you're going to get glass in your ass anyway.
Ask a ninja
Contrast between sanded and unsanded areas, and blisters
There are several things to note in the above and below pictures. First, you can see how large and far back our rudder is. Apparently this is a good thing, just annoying when it comes to hauling the boat out. Second, the difference between sanded and unsanded areas is very noticeable and approaching paintable. Third, the god damn blisters (white circles)!
Close-up of sanding and blisters
Blistering, or "boat pox" is a pretty interesting phenomenon, or it was to me at least. The cause is disputed as far as I could tell, but the most general explanation is "poor fiberglass work." Tritons, however, are known for their fiberglass integrity, so I'm leaning toward it being a more or less unavoidable outcome of boats being in water. It's essentially water that has penetrated a small area of the hull, creating a blister. It functions almost as a disease, because the more blisters you have the more likely you are to get more. Some are more obvious than others, and as you sand more and more become visible. For the most part they're raised, so the paint gets sanded off moreso than the surrounding area causing a conveniently noticeable white spot. Others are flat, and only become noticeable after they sit for a day and begin leaking water, or by tapping the hull and listening for areas that resonate differently.
Blister work
To repair the blisters, you sand them down until you're beyond the damp layers of fiberglass and re-glass them. This is done with a smaller power-sander like I'm holding in the above picture. It's tedious and hot work, but actually satisfying when you first pop the blister. Water has been inside for so long that it's fermented and reaks of vinegar. Generally it will squirt out in a good three foot arc. Let it drip until it's dried as much as it can, and sand the rest.
The immediate effects of boat pox seemed also to be disputed. The general stance seems to be "Well it's not supposed to be like that, so it needs to be fixed." That argument holds some water, I suppose (LOL PUN). If you're racing (which we hopefully will in time), the blisters will slow your boat. If left untreated for long enough, the water can potentially begin leaking into your bilge. Again, though, our boat hadn't been out in fifteen years and this didn't appear to be even close to happening -- although to be fair the fiberglass on our hull is ridiculously thick. 1959 REPRESENT.
End of day 1
All in all we had 40 blisters and probably another good handfull we didn't even discover. This sounds like quite a bit, but given the amount of time Soup has sat dormant in Pontchartrain it's actually pretty few. I've seen much newer equally-sized boats get hauled out in that yard with literally hundreds upon hundreds of blisters. By the end of day 1 and 20 sanding pads later, the majority of the hull had been sanded down and all 40 blistershad been sanded to where they needed to be, waiting to be glassed over.
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