Getting Ready - Boat Projects at Home

With the countdown timer running, we used any spare time to get some boat projects done while we had the space and tools that would make the job easier. Woodworking definitely falls into the category of "easier in a shop". We had a couple of projects in mind.

The cockpit table being high on the list. It is tough to replace a perfectly good table, but the idea of having a nice wood table was too tempting. Teak seemed the right option, until we saw the price. We opted for Sepela...

The oil finish really brings out the beauty in the wood.

Hopefully will be relatively easy to maintain!

We also had plans to reinforce the existing helm seat step stool. The original fiberglass stool was cracked in a few places and didn't feel too stable. Since we had some leftover Sepela scraps, I made a quick wood stool to replace the old fiberglass one.

We had one large sewing project that made sense to do at home too. The old sail bag had seen it's share of adventures and was a bit worn out. The Sail Bag mounts to the boom, and is a cover to protect the sail when not in use, so it gets a lot of sun, wind, rain, etc. exposure.

This was a great opportunity to put the Sailrite sewing machine to work! We used the existing bag as a template to figure out how the whole thing went together. It also starts the slow conversion to black canvas... stay tuned for more..

Little did we know that our living room wasn't big enough to lay out the full size of this sail bag. This thing is 19' long by 7' tall. With some careful Tetris layout, we managed to get it to fit the new fabric with only one extra seam.

Luckily there is a lot of room for error when sewing something like this. I'm no expert, but I do enjoy figuring out how it all goes together.