Building a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory -- Sanding and Varnishing

"Sanding can be seen as drudgery, or it can be a sculpture exercise, depending upon your outlook." John Harris

I tried -- I really did try -- to be motivated by the advice that opens this blog entry. I was thoroughly pleased with the way my dory turned out after being coated with fiberglass. And I moved on to sanding the interior with a good heart. The goal was to sand every inch of the interior until it was entirely smooth and the gloss of the epoxy was turned cloudy by the sandpaper.

The best I could do was to get most of the interior quite smooth, but some parts of the fiberglass cloth had been coated with a bit too much epoxy by this first-time builder. Then the fiberglass cloth tends to float in the pool of liquid epoxy. If one subsequently tries to sand these lumpy areas down to the level of the rest, one can end up cutting into the cloth itself (a no-no). In addition there were lots of other areas that I could get almost entirely smooth, but once everything was wiped down with mineral spirits, there would still be small, shiny dimples -- like evidence of a mocking smile. 

In building a boat, as in medicine, my first rule is, "Do no harm!" Trying to sand every bit of the boat to a cloudy gray risked sanding right through the epoxy -- especially along the edges of the strakes. In the end I decided it was worse to sand through to bare wood than it was to leave a scattering of shiny dots. I'm hoping that those places have been roughed up enough by multiple sandings and by washing with mineral spirits that they will give provide a good surface for my layers of varnish to grip.

Thus, when we got a 60-degree afternoon last week, I seized the day and applied my first finish coat of varnish. It went on smoothly with only one small streak of drips to sand out later. To my eye the boat looks even smoother and prettier than before. . . . And all of this will be smoothed even more by three more coats of varnish.

So all I ask is another week or two of Indian Summer before winter settles in fully so that I can finish varnishing the entire boat.