Returning to Somerledi, my focus was to complete the blister repairs on the port side, to include the second and final round of fairing filler. I had optimistic intentions of getting at least some of the barrier coat on her forward section of the hull, however that was not to be.

My first order of business was to water-wash the amine blush from the port repairs, as well as taking off the work yard contaminates. I accomplished this with a Scotchbrite pad, rinsing, scrubbing and rinsing. I moved around to the starboard bottom and simply rinsed it off. With the current temperatures, by the time I sorted the water hose the port side was dry and ready for work. I used a 6" sander and 80-grit paper to sand fair the West System fairing filler - applied on my previous visit. From the white 410 micro-light fairing filler, I moved straight into fairing the first filler and patch work done previously. This was a bow to stern + rudder effort to take down the repair work to a fair surface. Hand-sanding was done at the turn of the bilge in order to protect the fair surface and avoid an accidental gouge by the sander's edge. With the entirety of the port hull faired, I rinsed the hull off with water once again, followed by a cleaning with acetone to remove any remaining contaminate and sanding dust.

At this point, I decided to focus on 410 micro-light fairing to continue the rebuild work. All ground out blisters have been addressed at this point, save for roughly ~30 locations I could not get to on my previous visit. I ended up mixing several 3 to 4 ounce pots of West System epoxy, thickening it with the West System 410 micro-light, and scraping over the previous work with a plastic squeegee. This effort brought the initial patch and fairing to a proper fairing as the repair location related to its surrounding hull surface. I internally worked around the ~30 locations requiring fiberglass, saving those for the final day's "tache". With the port side faired (second fairing), plus the rudder, I switched gears to the fiberglass work.

I stated in an earlier post, the bad news is numerous blisters, but the good news is those blisters for the most part are very shallow - only into the second or third laminate layer. Application of fiberglass only required one layer of 1708 biaxial, for the most part - there were locations that required additional layers of glass due to their depth or discovered voids, As I did in prior sessions, I used a clear sheet of plastic to create a patch template, oriented the template to point upwards with a notating tick mark, and then numbered the individual patch. I worked in batches of five to six patches at a time...providing me with ample opening working time on the epoxy clock. I ended up getting nearly all of the patches in, save for about six of them as I ran out of daylight. So at this point, the port side is 99% there, and ready for a final sanding and start of the barrier coat.

Total Hrs: 9