I was talking to a friend who said “the blog was not as exciting last week”. I have been dealing with this too. In the beginning there were big changes and progress was easy to see. Then we got into that middle ground where things were happening to Gypsy, but it was hard to show progress. Well progress is still illusive, but to quote one infamous politician of my youth, there is now light at the end of the tunnel. What I am trying to say is we are now into the reconstruction phase. The destruction is over and we are working on rebuilding Gypsy. It takes a while to realize that this corner has been turned.
We have a completed new rudder, the cockpit is taking shape. The new cockpit sole is going in and the combings are starting to get finished. We have glued all of the extra wood to the shear clamp, which was a two weekend project. The deck hardware is getting located and the bolt holes for it are getting cast with epoxy. The propeller shaft strut was aligned this week. We discovered that it has been out of alignment since the boat was new. So lots of little things are starting to come together. There are of course pages of to-do list yet to complete so there will be no rest for any of us for a while.
The other thing I am learning is scale. I used to buy a gallon of epoxy to do little repairs on Gypsy and it would last 5 years. This last weekend we were going through a gallon of epoxy a day. That is just one illustration of how the scope of this project dwarfs our past experience. But what experience we are getting!
GypsyKramer 