This little pile of fiberglass fabric doesn’t look so bad, right? It started the day headed in to the floats to glass in the chainplates.

But crawling around inside these outer float hulls in the dark with no soles (floors) and stoop over headroom makes for a challenging day. The builder gets to do a circus acrobat move to get thru the bulkhead opening seen in this shot.

These lamps got the air temp to about 120 and the radiant heat was well in to the 160 range without trying to put this 35′ boat in to that auto paint booth we saw the other day! So it’s a localized heat post curing process inside the floats. The other side is under the lamps as this is written, with a sore back and various bruises. Boat bit back a little today, but she now has very strong anchor points for the 50′ mast.
Here’s that finished chainplate from forward, facing aft:

And from aft, looking forward. The glass looks a bit green in these photos – that’s the look of the resin still in curing / hardening mode. In a few days it will go basically colorless.

Five days of work, and all most people will ever see are these innocuous little stubs on deck:

With a bit of shaping around the base, the Colligo “Terminators” fit right in. The last step is some lightweight finish glass cloth around the fitting up on deck – that’s a tiny job in the scheme of this project, so we’re pretty relieved tonight.

Looking over the master to-do list, seems we’ve past the milestone of completing major structural builds. The chainplates had been looming, and the rest is non-load bearing / furniture type stuff, then fairing,sanding and prepping for paint.

The purchase order for the sails went in this week. They should be built during March, and delivered before the boat is launched. Keith Burrage of Skateaway Designs and I have gone over the measurements many times and he’s got a really exciting sail plan for the boat. This is so much better than the earlier assumption that we had to launch first with used crappy Craigslist sails and wait months before a sailmaker came to the new boat, took measures and went away to build. Instead, the drawing is done and we’re ahead of the loft rush during winter for Maine Sailing Partners. We even get to pick three colors for the radial cut Reacher! Jeanne, get the colored pens out for options…