G9 minus four

Four days until the G9 Boatbuilders Gathering.

Okay, I admit it. I didnt even touch the boat today. 

Too much else to do.

So, Ill post a couple of photos I took at G8...

...and a few from G7:

An old Chris-Craft cruiser

And, heres the view looking off the back of a beautifully-built Glen-L Zip.

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Desert Storm Tan Repaint

Over the last few years I have been painting the skins of my skin on frame boats with polyurethane varnish.  The varnish has UV blockers in it that protect the synthetic boat fabric from degradation by the UV.  The fabric I use is either nylon and of  late, mostly polyester.  Both get degraded by UV more or less equally.  Degradation means the fiber loses its flexibility and strength and crumbles into dust.  This is not a good thing in a boat skin and so it must be prevented.
In the past, I would try to touch up the varnish.  That worked for a little while but new polyurethane does not adhere well to old polyurethane.  The touch up varnish when exposed to sunlight for about a year starts to peel off.

Heres the original latex painted boat,  exposed to full sun for over two years already with no visible damage to the paint.

The solution as it turned out is latex paint.  Latex paint sticks to degraded polyurethane varnish and it effectively blocks UV radiation and it also is more flexible than polyurethane and does not crack.  Coincidentally, the polymer used in latex paint is acrylic, same stuff that they make UV resistant fabric like Sunbrella out of. You might ask, why not just cover the boats in sunbrella.  Good question.  I suspect it has to do with the price of sunbrella.  And you still have to paint the stuff to make it waterproof.

Heres the King Island kayak about to get a coat of tan paint.  Note the previously yellowish varnish starting to turn a chalky white, a clear sign that is near the end of its life.

The paint I was using was free give-away stuff left over from repainting about an acres worth of commercial buildings in the neighborhood.  The commercial buildings have not peeled and neither have my boats.  Only drawback to this paint is its color, an unattractive sort of Desert Storm Tan.  Oh well, I also have four gallons of Gulf of Tonkin Gray.

And here is one of my baidarkas with a new coat of Desert Storm Tan or maybe it should be called, Afghanis-Tan or would you prefer Afghanistan-Tan

In any case, I painted about 4 boats yesterday.  Six left to go.

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A Four Egg Omelette

Technology brings us many wonderful gizmos and makes life as we are living it possible.  But as somebody once noted, "You cant make an omelette without breaking some eggs," the omelette being modern civilization and the eggs, well for lack of a better term, the natural world around us.
It just occurred to me after  my latest post on radiation ascended into the CLOUD, Google Division, that when we make omelettes, we like to crack more than one egg.  Take the Pacific Ocean.  Thats a four egg omelette. Let me enumerate the four ways to crack these eggs.

Overfishing - thats probably the oldest method of messing up the Pacific
The Plastic Gyres - dump plastic in the ocean, let it decompose and choke marine life with it.
Acidification - that scheme came to my consciousness about the same time as the Plastic Gyres. We generate CO2.  CO2 dissolves in the ocean and creates a mild acid and the acid dissolves the calcium carbonate that marine creatures need to make their bones out of.
Radioactive material - The amount that has been dumped into the Pacific is probably less harmful than acidification or overfishing, but who knows, were not done dumping yet.

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