Nearly there!

I will be finished with the painting in the walkway and aft cabin tomorrow, at long last. It has taken me longer than I expected, basically the job was bigger than I thought, with a lot more surface area than was apparent. That will be good though, it will really be a shot in the arm to see the last light fittings, switches and plugs in place. Next will be getting some guys in to fit the hull liner into the forward cabin, saloon and aft cabin. Bill has been doing a few smaller jobs, one of which was adding 10mm fibreglass plates to the chainplates. This will hopefully keep them up out of the scuppers a bit. My plan is to make stainless plates to fit over the top of the chainplates, making a secure sealant-filled gasket.

On top of the cockpit coamings we have added a lump of teak which will hold the lower end of the dodger. The thinking here is that water should be kept out of the "watchkeeping" seats at the forward end of the cockpit. Hopefully one day we should be able to actually put that to the test!

The nav station is complete - not wired up yet though! I haven't bought the Fusion marine stereo yet, as you can see by the hole. I had purchased a CD player and stacker when I was in Hawaii but I think MP3 technology has really taken over from CDs and this will save a truckload of space. I will put a remote stereo control in the cockpit, the unit also deals with the different requirements in saloon and cockpit, without having to use the Fade controls.

Bill has just started on the rudder and I want to take photos of each stage of the process. I built the stands to allow him to work on the rudder easily, his first step is to fill the internal holes and create the overall shape using 12mm higher density Divinycell. Then that will get a pretty serious layer of glass, and then the outside layer of foam and glass to produce the finished product.