Who's the old guy driving my boat?

I turn 50 this year, the boat is 53. The boat still looks pretty good.

B.O.A.T. Gel Coat Repair

They say B.O.A.T stands for Bust Out Another Thousand... One of the previous owners of our Dorsett evidently ran over a rock and the result was a pretty nice scrape of the gel coat on the bottom of the boat.

 

In addition there were some scrapes all the way through the gel coat  at the lower edge of the transom. Since I leave the boat in the water for 3-4 days at a time, to seal the fiberglass I went ahead and did the same repair on the transom using a little two-part marine resin. 

Unfortunately, I found that the salt was removing both fixes as when I would pull the boat out and clean it the resin was flaking off. I was concerned this would eventually fail and the fiberglass would begin to soak up water, delaminate and in my mind that led to the boat sinking.

To fix this I decided to bite the bullet and have a professional repair the gel coat. I was fortunate to find Mel. He is a local mobile boat gel coat repair technician and he and his helper George came out and did a great job fixing the scars.

Here's the big fixes. Mel also found two hairline cracks in the gel coat parallel to the trailer supports. These cracks were ground out. New glass was placed across the area and filler and gel coated.

  

For some reason, someone drilled three holes in the gun whale these were also filled and gel coated.

Scars and chips on the splash well from a trolling motor were sanded filled and gel coated.

In addition to the big stuff Mel fixed a couple of chips on the lower edge of the side and cleaned up a whole bunch of scratches on the bottom of the boat. George spent two days on his back just sanding the bottom of the boat!

Mel did a great job at matching the 50 year old / faded color. The repairs are  barely visible unless you are in direct sun light, looking on an angle and you know what to look for. In my book that's a great job.

  

I feel a lot better now as the bottom of the boat is properly sealed. I just didn't want to come out to the dock one morning and see the boat under water.

This fix was $900... Bust out another thousand.

July 4th Newport Dunes Fireworks

This year Fourth of July boating in the Newport Harbor could best be described as "sticky". We rarely get humidity on our coast but this year we were unseasonably warm for July. The inland heat resulted in low cloud cover at the beach for most of the weekend with higher than normal humidity levels. Thursday evening was capped off by the Newport Dunes fireworks display.

Sunsets

This might be our favorite part of boating, sunsets in the summer.

Redneck Roundy Round

My wife drug me out of bed at 8:00 AM. She said if the boat was in the garage I would have already been out there working on it. So we gathered our stuff and headed down to the boat. We have a thing here in SoCal called June Gloom. Its a "marine layer" that usually burns off between 10:00 and 12:00. But we committed to the restaurant manager that we would be back at 9:00 AM, so we were on time. Where we docked the boat is next to dock for the Catalina Flyer a commercial transport that runs from Newport Beach to Avalon on Catalina Island on daily schedule. The flyer leaves at 9:00 AM, so there we were with 500 people staring at our 53 year old 15' boat from this multimillion dollar 100 foot 3 level catamaran. The little Scott fired right up and we were off for another day of cruising.

We had been out for about an hour and when we were crossing the Yacht Basin. I opened up throttle a little to keep up with traffic and the motor started to die! I was wondering what was happening everything was running so nicely. I considered heading back to the Dunes to load up the boat. My wife asked "do we have fuel?" I responded "Yes, we put gas in last night!". We took the boat to the public pier at the end of our street and I was perplexed. I pulled the hood and fiddled around with the idle adjustment. I started the motor a couple times and it choked out. Then the batteries started getting a little tired and the boat wouldn't start.

I finally agreed that maybe the 1" of fuel in the bottom of the tank might not be enough. I figured at the very least I'd walk down the 4 blocks to get more fuel and that would give the batteries time to recover. I saw the kid who helped us last night and bought another 4 gallons of gas. A gallon of gas (or less) doesn't weigh much, 5 gallons does. When I got back my wife asked where I went and asked why I didn't get gas from the fuel dock that was 2 blocks closer. (Yes I actually walked past a fuel dock. She is a great 1st mate but I have authority issues.) With more fuel and a few minutes to rest the batteries, the Scott started right up. Maybe she was right. The Scott likes fuel, we are burning about 2 gallons an hour at 2000 RPM speeds.

We proceeded to cruise the harbor around and around for next 4 hours. We fueled twice, got take-out pizza for lunch on the boat and waved a many passers-by who would give us the thumbs-up. We even saw a '68 Dorsett who we waved at and shouted greetings as we passed by. Basically we spent five hours driving in circles. Since we named her Whisky Tango I decided that we were going to rename the Harbor Cruise the Redneck Roundy Round.

We have plans to keep the Dorsett at a friends dock on the weekends but still he had another friends boat tied up, so At about 2 PM I suggested we take her over to the Dunes and pull her out of the water to give her a fresh-water bath inside and out. So my 1st Mate reluctantly agreed. Later she figured out that I was sun-burnt and was ready to get out of the sun (and yes my neck is red). So I dropped her off and she met me at the Dunes with the trailer. We loaded up the Dorsett and chatted with a car-collector who was at the Dunes for the Russo and Steele Collector Automobile Auctions. He was a boat mechanic when he was a young man and fondly remembers working on the old Scott motors. You meet the nicest people when you have a cool old boat.

We brought her home and gave her a full wash and ran her in fresh water for 15 minutes to flush the motor. My wife looked at me and said... "I've had more fun that last two days, why did we wait so long (25 years) to get a boat?" I guess that's what its all about.

Maiden Voyage, Sunset Harbor Cruise

 Friday night at 5:00 P.M we hitched the Dorsett to the truck and took it over to the Newport Dunes for an evening cruise. It was only a month ago I was over here but the cruise only lasted 100 yards out and 100 yards back. Tonight I was confident we would be cruising in style.

The Dorsett fired right up and I motored away from the dock at idle. Then hammer down to... 5 MPH (Newport Harbor speed limit). She cruised right along and I took the 4 mile ride to the public dock at the end of our street. My son drove the trailer the 12 mile drive home. (This is one of the few occasions when a 5 MPH boat ride is faster to than the car.) Welcome to the beach in Southern California.


We stopped at Hills Boat Service and fueled up our 6 gallon fuel tank that holds 4-5 useable gallons. The young attendant noticed the boat was idling a little high at 2000 RPM at idle. He offer to adjust the idle and when I pulled the hood he looked at the three carbs and was a little surprised. I turned the screws down a 1/4 turn (to 2-3/4) and we were off.

My wife and I took a nice 3 hour harbor cruise. The boat ran great and just purred along. Old two stokes are loud and smelly. With that said, Harbor crusing in the front seats was great. We could talk normally and there was very little fume. Passengers in the back seat will get a totally different experience.

We ended the night at the Habor Side restaurant and we got in our order just before the Kitchen closed at 9 PM. We had a classic Sunset Cruise on the Harbor.

We were fortunate to be able to leave our boat at the restaurant over night with the promise that we would pick it up by 9:00 AM.

Compound, Finish, Wax On, Wax Off

This boat is so close to getting back in the water I can taste it! But what would a maiden voyage be without a wax and polish? Whisky Tango looks great wet, but when its dry the gelcoat has a slightly cloudy appearance.

Gelcoat is the coating sprayed up against a highly polished mold at the beginning of the fiberglass layup process. On new boats, this surface is very smooth, mirror-like and pleasing to the eye. As gelcoat ages, it becomes porous. The more porous it becomes, the more easily it stains, the worse it looks and the harder it is to clean. Since our boat had at least 5 years of oxidation, I decided to have the whole boat polished and waxed to make Whisky Tango shine like new!

Although this is a potential do it yourself project, polishing gel-coat is part art and a part hard labor. While I'm not afraid of labor, I decided to bring in the professionals on this one. I called Perutti Boat Works in Costa Mesa, CA. They have a mobile service and are very easy to work with. They completed a 3-part Compound, Finishing and Wax of the boat. Here's what they did:

Step 1 Compounding
Since the whole boat and especially the topsides were really faded, this was done to bring back the original color and knock out the ugly, faded look. The compound was applied with an electric polisher and a pad.

Step 2 Finishing
The next step they did was to follow the Compounding with a Finishing Material boat polish in order to get a glossy, bright finish. The finishing was also done with a polisher and a pad.

Step 3 Waxing
After the boat polish was applied, the final step was to protect the finish with a wax. It's important to seal and protect the finish with a good wax to maintain the gloss from the finishing step.

This was an all day process but was well worth it as the results were amazing.