Cake Or Death.

THIS is the reason why we’ve pushed and pushed this summer, and I know that parents, friends and crew will be dying to see the results so I’d better get on with it. We are pleased to say that the entire interior of the vessel is now covered in sprayfoam insulation, mostly to a depth of at least three inches. Which gave us both the ideal opportunity to get fairly drunk on cheap fizz at an entirely inappropriate time of the afternoon.
But it wasn’t easy getting there, oh no, and I’m not talking about the jobs we did in preparation either. After trying the ‘cold’ (30˚C) foam DIY kits in our cabin we decided that for many reasons it’d probably be worth the money to have the big job of the hull done with ‘hot’ foam by professionals, not least that by the time we’d got all the prep done I’d most likely be completely knackered- which indeed I was. We hoped that spending money on professionals would make things easier, in one way it did, and it’s hard to find serious fault in the quality of their finished work. However, when we hoped that getting the professionals in would be stress free, we were wrong. Communication with the company we chose was akin to extracting blood from a stone once they’d taken our deposit (nearly two grand), and the job ended up happening over a week later than it should because of a simple failure to check their equipment which led to a small but critical malfunction on site the first time they turned up. Consequently the last fortnight has been massively stressful for us, so I guess the lesson here is that no matter how you choose to attack a big task, it’ll probably cause more hair loss one way or the other.
They did make a good job of it in the end though, and being me I was determined to basically stand alongside the man on the gun and heckle him every time I considered a spot ‘too thin’, he took this treatment fairly well considering and we got on cheerfully, which means that there are few holidays and most of the job is well over spec. Hell, I even persuaded him to put an inch or so over the inside of the funnel, which raised an eyebrow or two when I suggested it.
The process did however, get foam everywhere- which I suppose you could say is the whole point, but it’s going to take weeks to cut back the foam where it needs it, expose all the battens again (luckily I masked every last batten face with gaffer tape, otherwise I’d be buggered) and take all the mess away. Especially from the bilges where all the stuff I’ve already started cutting back has inevitably ended up. Godddd.

And the rivets are gone, all that super clean steelwork is covered up forever. I feel fine about this, being pretty much sick of the sight of it by now- but a friend who saw the results on Saturday morning said “part of me wants to cry” and I know what he’s getting at. The interior of Wendy Ann no longer looks like an engineering masterpiece, instead she now looks very organic indeed, like being inside a giant cream bun. Part of me wants to cry too, but mainly because I have to do that bloody big tidy up yet again. On the plus side, this really does mean the final and absolute end of shivering our arses off at pick-a-number-below-zero in the winters. Result.