Sunday afternoon got me back right into work on sanding the boom. For a few of the new boom fittings, I needed to fill the holes of the old fittings, and so this was done the day prior. With 220-grit paper, I carefully sanded the thickened epoxy filler until I achieved a fair surface. In a couple spots, I blew through the primer just slightly and so I finished the day's boom work with touch up paint (primer).

I then moved out to Biscuit and continued sanding the light-fairing compound applied to various spot-work to the interior of Biscuit: the seacock base plates, the small traverse bulkhead forward of the seacocks, and the vertical surface to starboard and just aft of the v-berth. The spot-fairing I did on Saturday was meant to be the final round...and it was. The hand-sanding results were very good. After a bit of work with the seacocks, paint will follow for the interior.

The work I wanted to do with the seacocks prior to painting the interior was to pre-drill for the fasteners. Using the seacocks, and a couple short 5/16" bronze machine screws, I mounted the flanged seacocks to the base plates drilled out the fastener holes one at a time. The seacocks flanges were secure to the base plates by three machine screws, so I inserted two of the screws to "lock" the seacock in position and then drilled out the other open hole. I rotated the screws around the seacock as I drilled out each hole. I repeated this process for the port seacock as well.

Once the fastener holes were drilled out, I moved to the exterior of the boat and tapered them to accept the machine screw heads. Prior to final installation, this area of the hull exterior will be sanded, screw heads covered, and then painted with anti-foul. The final bit of work on Biscuit for the day included taking measurements of the thickness from the surface of the base plate to the hull's exterior surface - this was done to understand the length of fasteners for the seacock installation. After adding the thickness of the seacock flange, I settled on 6 slotted silicon bronze machine screws 2.5" in length, sized at 5/16". I also measured for the length of the through-hull fittings, to understand if I needed to remove any length. The thickness of the hull, plus the base plate, allowed for an unaltered fitting to be installed. I ordered the machine screws that evening.

Monday, late afternoon, I headed out to the shop to lightly sand the boom and apply the first coat of finish paint to the boom. It is likely that two additional coats of finish paint will follow this first coat.

Total Hrs: 3.75 (4/6 and 4/7/2025)