Our friend, Wayne, came out over the Canada Day weekend to pick up his canoe that we had in storage here.
He built this fiberglass canoe using the moulds of a canoe club he belonged to 25 or so years ago. He figured we’d just put on a quick coat of paint and be ready to go, but I wasn’t too sure. Some of the wood wasn’t looking too good the last time I looked.
So up early and out to the canoe only to discover that while the interior wood was still serviceable, the outwales were truly rotten! What to do? It happens that having another boat being built provides for some nice old growth Douglas fir, but we’d have to scarph shorter pieces to get the right length. Meanwhile we took all the wood out of the boat and started preparing it for refinishing.
Day two had us putting a coat of nice green Brightsides onto the hull which turned out beautifully. The rest of the day was a comedy of errors in woodworking that I’d just as soon forget about. My story is that the heat made me screw up, but at the end of the day, instead of varnishing in preparation for assembly the next morning, we were epoxying a break and a crack that resulted from trial fitting the almost completed outwales into position.
Day three had us sanding and finally varnishing the outwales, but they would have to spend a few hours drying before we could assemble the boat for the road and time was very short, so one coat would have to do for now! Around 2 pm the things were finally dry enough to handle and we spend the next two hours bending and screwing the new wales into place.
At about 5 pm, the canoe is loaded onto Wayne’s Blazer and he headed out on his six hour drive home.