This could take a very long time

Ms. Bettencourt's dashboard looks a little like a Google Earth view of prairie farmland around Pawnee Rock, Kansas. There are strangely regular road-like networks of tiny little cracks across most of the horizontal surfaces.

This is nothing new. This is the way the boat came to me some years ago. And it's not just my boat. I have seen this same phenomenon on a dozen or more Albin 25s.

I thought I had Ms. Bettencourt fixed after a complete repainting about eight years ago. But I was wrong. The cracks reappeared and, once again, began collecting ugly grime.

One correspondent suggested these little flaws are a result of a design that allows too much flexing around the dashboard area. He wrote that he thinks the cracks are in the gelcoat (under my earlier paint job), and the only fix would be to grind the gelcoat down to the underlying fiberglass, then repaint again.

I picked one of the worst areas and started grinding. A problem arose almost immediately. The larger cracks go through the gelcoat and relatively deeply into the fiberglass below. I found a few more than 0.5mm deep. I think that's too deep to grind out.

The cracks are hard to photograph, but if you click to enlarge this picture you should be able to see some larger fisures, including the crevice at the point of this tool.

So, here's Plan-B. I am going to grind off as much as the old paint as possible and clean the network of crevices as best I can. I'll use a dental pick and a Dreml rotary tool with a conical bur bit for the crack work. It will be tedious and slow.

The sanded patch above is about an hour's work with a Dreml oscillating tool. The Dreml out-performs my other sanding machines, but I have to stop frequently to let it cool off.

After the dashboard and surround are sanded and prepped I am going to try an application of Interlux Surfacing Putty  http://tinyurl.com/me3kdhf . The spec sheet on this product says it is compatible with Interlux PreKote primer and Interlux Brightside one-part polyurethane paint, which are the primer and finish coatings I plan to use.

The dashboard crazing is so widespread that, practically, I have little hope of perfection. I'll try to find, clean and fill the largest and deepest canyons and to sand as much as the remaining crazing as level as possible.

More sanding will be required to fair the surface.

This could go on forever.

Middle cabin project begins

Ms. Bettencourt's center cabin, the area that provides interior access to the rest of the boat and from which the vessel is operated, is in need of major refurbishment. The overhead and bulkheads were painted when the new top went on more than a year ago, but the dashboard, the seats and the deck can only be described as nasty.

The dashboard is the trickiest part of the job, since all the electronics, other instruments, controls, gauges and switches must be removed before the surface can be prepared for repainting. That part of the work started yesterday and was finished today.

Tracing, disconnecting and tagging electrical and antenna connections was a tedious task. This photo shows the electrical panel and the underside of the dashboard. All those colored tags will help me get everything back where it goes at the appropriate time.

I was able to lift and block up the main instrument cluster and the engine shift and throttle controls without having to make major disconnections. That's a feature I'm glad I thought of when  Ms. Bettencourt's instruments and controls array was restored about 10 years ago.

So, here's what it looked like this afternoon, following removal of the steering wheel and everything else that needed to move. If you click to enlarge this photo you will be able to see how I have the main instrument cluster blocked up with wood scraps so I can clean, sand and paint under its edges.

While this doesn't look too bad from a distance, the following shot, closer in and from a different angle, reveals why refinishing is a priority.

Enlarging this picture will show some of the cracks, dings, dirt, epoxy splats and other imperfections I expect to fix in coming weeks.




Re-doing the dash will also present an opportunity to play with the placement of communication and navigation devices that have been added around the steering area piecemeal over the years.

Ms. Bettencourt won't be going anywhere until all this is refurbished and reassembled. There's a lot more work to be done in the middle cabin, but the dash is the most difficult and the rest should follow fairly rapidly.

"How high's the water, Mama?

...six feet high and rising ...."  It has been raining here all month, and not a day goes by without those lyrics from a Johnny Cash ballad popping into my mind.The water level in the Savannah River outside our back door seems to have stopped rising, but the water velocity has increased substantially.

The river is booming past our dock at about 46,400 cubic feet per second (according to the nearest US Geological Survey stream monitor gauge), bringing with it large quantities of logs and other flotsam.

The usual summer flow rate here is about 3,800cfs. This time last week, Engineers were releasing 16,000cfs.

That soggy and un-mowed  swatch of green in the foreground of the photo above is part of our lawn. The floor of the gazebo to the left in this photo is usually about eight feet above the water.

And it continues to rain and rain and rain.

All of the three large dams upstream from our home are full to over-full. The Army Corps of Engineers, manager of the dams in the Savannah River watershed, is releasing water as fast as it can without causing undue downstream damage.

In a report yesterday,  Engineers estimated it will take three weeks to a month of water releases at the present rate to bring the reservoirs down from flood to storage levels. That estimate assumes rainfall will moderate soon.

Army Corps of Engineers photo

Also yesterday, about a thousand people showed up at the Thurmond Dam to witness a timely test of the structure's 23 floodgates. The floodgates apparently worked satisfactorily.




All the rain has caused the atmosphere to be really funky inside Ms. Bettencourt. The relative humidity seems to be approaching mushroom growing levels.

I have been fighting mildew on the overheads, bulkheads and decks. Condensation under the bunk mattresses has become such a concern that I will bring the mattresses into the house if it ever stops raining. The pilot house windows and all the under-seat lockers are open, with a large fan running in the forward cabin. Perhaps air movement will help abate the fungus.

Painting inside the pilot house cabin in such weather is out of the question, but I have begun some halting surface preparation.

Even a little sunshine would be very motivating.

A stormy time on the river

It appears that the drought has ended in this part of the Southeastern United States. It has rained abundantly for much of the last two weeks. All three of the large Savannah River impoundments upstream from our dock are now full. In fact, the largest is over-full. The Army Corps of Engineers is trying to do what it calls "balancing the basin" by increasing outflows to match watershed inflows, while holding lake levels as full as safely possible.

Before the recent rainfall torents, engineers were releasing only enough water from the dams to assure minimal river flow to the Port of Savannah. Until last week, this was about 3,800 cubic feet per second, as measured at Thurmond Dam on the lake at the southernmost end of the system. This morning, the flow was about 16,000 cfs.

One result of the increased flow is that all the junk, old limbs, tree trunks and other stuff that had been above the previous high water mark,  has been washed adrift. A lot of it piles up on our dock, necessitating twice-daily logjam clearing work. I use an old 6-foot oar as a lever to move the stuff out into the stream.

While the water flow is five times what we usually see here, the present volume is not particularly worrisome. In the 12 years we have lived on the river, we have seen flows of more than 30,000 cfs at least a couple of times, with water levels rising as much as eight feet.

Interestingly, in spite of the the much greater volume of water, engineers have held the water level in our area of the river close to the usual depth. There is a small dam with a lock about 13 miles downstream from our dock. Engineers must be managing releases from that dam to hold the pool level relatively constant.

Army engineers are walking a water management tightrope, trying to balance current and expected inflows with dam releases. Full reservoirs, continuing high levels of rainfall and the impending Atlantic hurricane season pose a potentially destructive scenario: What if a hurricane develops and dumps even more water in the basin?

Nothing like that is predicted at the moment, but engineers have announced they will be testing the floodgates at all three dams next week. All of Thurmond's floodgates have not been opened since 2007.

Ms. Bettencourt, meanwhile, is untroubled by these phenomena.

As evidenced by the spider work on her stern line, she has not moved in some time.

Her cooling system overhaul was completed and tested for leaks last week.

There was no sign of  overheating during a prolonged period of running the engine at.the dock.

The real test, however, will be a long run at about 80 percent power.

There will be such a run in a few days. Then, assuming everything works as expected, the current plan is to spend the rest of the month relocating some dashboard electronics and repainting the pilothouse cabin.

After that, it's down to Savannah for some coastal cruising.