We made a dash trip to the boat to finish the Cetol on the bulwark. We got it done in a couple of hours and returned home. It turns out that the launch crew broke Inspiration’s masthead light – great! One is on order and I told them to launch next week but I wanted to be there for the launch. The Kalamazoo River is way up and the guage height is 9.5 feet and steeply rising – the flow is nearly 6000 cu ft per minute. I hope I can get up-river with this flow rate.

We are anticipating Inspiration’s launch in early May. Last Thursday and Friday Fred and I were at the boat painting the water line stripe with Pettit Unpoxy green. I was surprised by the light jade green color as I was expecting something in the very dark green color.

After sanding with the Fein Multimaster using grits between 400 and 120, we painted the Unpoxy with roller and brush. Fred used the roller and I tipped with the brush. The temperature was 50 degrees F inside the building. The roller left the expected orange peel type look and I followed up with a wet brush. I expected the brush marks to disappear and the finish to be shiny but this did not happen. The small brush marks remained and the surface is flat green. This color blends with the boat reasonably well so I am satisfied.

In retrospect, I would have added some of the thinner that states that it will retard the drying. This would allow the brush marks to disappear and flow better.

We also finished the rub rail with one more coat of cetol light and one of gloss. It looks very good.

Next comes the hand wax job and refinish of the bulwark half round strip. To do this I will have to generate a tool to sand the half round uniformly. I have some anti skid that has one side sticky so I will use this and a block of wood with a 1.5″ hole cut in half.

This is a video I came across on YouTube and I wanted to use this to demonstrate the new features of this version of WordPress.

This is a slideshow of Inspiration and the marina area. Really, the real purpose is to test the features of the new install of WordPress. We could not add these before.

This morning we took the time to upgrade a woefully out-of-date WordPress version to the latest and greatest. This is sort of nerve wracking and I am upgrading 4 different blogs and started with the least important first. This was totally successful.