January 3, 2003 For most of the summer, we were busy getting our Tartan 30 ready to sell, so we didn't work much on the new boat. In September we started making lists and began to tackle the daunting project of a major renovation. Neil's first task was to scrape the years of crusty bottom paint off. He supposed this would be a one- or two-weekend job and would involve grinding off the paint. After setting up a plastic tent around the boat to keep the rest of the building clean, donning a white protective suit and full face respirator in the 90 degree heat, and trying various techniques including sanding, grinding, chemical strippers, etc. he found that the most effective method was a plain 3" flat blade scraper and lots and lots of sweat! Working nearly every night after work and on weekends, the immense project stretched to 7 and a half weeks!!!!

Next we began removing the portlights and hatches. The bedding compound, although it had been leaking copiously in many places, was extremely tenacious in others. We discovered a miracle product called Anti-Bond, in a small yellow can. This stuff melts 5200! It made the port removal so much easier. We also removed the stanchions, pulpits, deck cleats, genoa tracks, etc. At the same time we began removing the interior joinery that was damaged and/or that we planned to rebuild differently. 

 We removed every piece of trim and furniture and labeled the backs before stacking them under the boat. It is going to be quite a project putting it all back together! Now the boat was beginning to look really awful. The owner of the yard commented that we'd brought in a perfectly good boat but now we had only half a boat! At this point, various friends and relatives were stopping by to see what all the fuss was about. Having never seen the boat when she was "whole", I fear that most of them think we are completely out of our minds.

We removed the cabin house sides, which had totally rotted. We removed the cabinet faces in the main salon, and were pleased to find the chain plate knees still solid. We're having the chain plates tested before reinstalling them. We removed the entire galley, since we are rebuilding it with a different configuration. We'll try to reuse as many pieces as possible, such as the molded fiberglass dry locker, and as many cabinet/locker doors as will fit in the new design. The sheer amount of expensive, beautiful teak on the boat is amazing.

When Neil removed the huge refrigerator/freezer (which was located where our new nav station will be) he found the primary source of the mildew smell. He says it was positively black with a veritable mold farm. He's not generally sensitive to mildew (whereas I am highly allergic to it) but even he said he was overcome by it! Ugh! He had a hell of a time removing the reefer, by the way. It was heavily tabbed to the hull with sprayed-in (now solid) foam all around it. There was much swearing and sawz-all wielding involved. Glad I wasn't there for that part!

The old 2-burner stove was removed. Although it's perfectly serviceable and could be cleaned up, I think that if at all possible we'll spring for a new one. I'd like a bigger oven, since I do a lot of cooking and baking, and I would feel more comfortable with the modern, thermo-coupled burners and piezo ignition.

As this removal and "demolition" was underway, I was spending a lot of time hunched over the dining table at home working on the final designs. Some things could not be decided until parts of the boat were removed. For example, we'd hoped to put the new battery box under the starboard settee, where there was originally a 60 gallon water tank. But it wasn't until the tank was removed (a pretty big task, once again involving the sawz-all since it was a fiberglass tank tabbed to the hull) that we could really know what space was available and whether the batteries would fit. Neil built plywood mock-ups of the batteries as well as the polyethylene water tank we hoped to add to recover some of the lost tankage from removing the original tank. Happily, we were able to fit three group 8D batteries and a 30 gallon tank. Perfect!

As the boat came apart, we were also able to see where various components of our BRAND NEW electrical system would go, and I finalized my 12V DC schematics and circuit diagrams. One Saturday we had lots of fun removing the contents of the engine room and the old wiring. We tossed the ancient, huge battery charger (that was always shocking Neil) in the dumpster. I'm always worried about electrical safety (I say healthily so, Neil says neurotically so...) so that made me very happy. We made a pile of the myriad pumps removed, which hopefully we can reuse many of. We traced electrical circuits, being careful not to cut any of the proprietary instrument feeds for things we were reusing, like the Autopilot and radar, and ripped out the rest. We removed all of the old and very grungy hoses and pipes we'd be replacing..... We still haven't yet decided whether to totally replace the rigid grey freshwater system in place, or only some of it as needed. I'm all for replacing it all with nice clean new hoses, but much of it runs in areas difficult to access and Neil would rather leave them be. We'll see....