Good progress - the poorly deck is better than new

David Sharp, owner of Baltic Wharf Repairs, came to our rescue to perform a superb repair to Maunie's deck. He first epoxied in a new foam core to replace the balsa, together with two marine ply pads (correctly positioned, this time!).

His ace fibreglass man, Andy, then came in to grind down the edges of the existing deck to a nice gentle taper and then applied six layers of bi-axial fibreglass cloth, each epoxied into place.

Edges of the deck ground out to allow the new fibreglass to provide a strong lap-joint to the old

New glassed top section

Epoxy filler to provide a perfectly level surface

Having watched this process being done, Graham thinks it's something he could probably do himself but he's very pleased that he got Dave and Andy to do it!

Meanwhile, though, Graham was engaged in his own epoxy story - fairing the surface of the rest of the deck to fill the holes left by the plank pins and other deck fittings and also levelling the divots left during the chiselling process. 

Once the epoxy had hardened overnight, the final stage was to sand and vacuum the decks. A time-consuming process! However, so far we reckon we've saved about £9,000 in yard labour costs by doing all this preparation work ourselves.

So, the good news is that the hard and dusty work is almost over. Some detail sanding and polishing remains to be done to remove the last residue of sealant where the old deck met the cabin sides (a full, fun day on Sunday should see this completed) but the new deck has arrived and the fitting process has begun!

Rick, the deck specialist, unwraps the parcel

Starting the fine-tuning of the fit - a small plane is used to trim the edges. There won't be a line of black caulking at the outer edges so the fit needs to be exact and the fibreglass needs to be clean and polished before the deck is glued into place

We'll post some photos when it's finished.

We left the boatyard on Friday evening, both of us feeling pretty shattered after a full-on week. However, we managed to keep our sense of humour through the tougher moments and Di's skills have been applied to lots of the jobs that Graham finds just too detailed and fiddly.

Surgically removing the lettering from the stern ready for the repaint