Fairing

Fairing really is an art and involves plenty of judging by eye but it was also really helpful to run my fingers over the surface, especially with my eyes closed because this allowed me to find the high spots and low spots so that I knew whether to attack with the long-board or to wait and apply more fairing compound in the low spots. Often I would draw pencil marks all over the high spots so that I knew where to sand and also to stop when the pencil disappeared to avoid creating artificial low spots.

After a few rounds of applying the compound and sanding back, we applied a thin guide coat of black spray paint to identify any remaining low spots. This worked because we applied the paint all over and then used the long-board to sand through the paint. Any areas where there was still paint were therefore low areas that the long-board had bridged and so not sanded. So these were the areas where we had to apply more fairing compound.

This wasn't a fast process because the sanding took time and we had to wait almost a day for the two-part fairing compound to harden sufficiently to be able to sand.

Waterline

Once the fairing was done, we then had to draw in the waterline on the new section of the hull which was an interesting little challenge because of the complexity of the hull shape. Luckily we still had the waterline on the other side of the boat to take measurements off. After a little bit of head-scratching, we marked the chine every six inches on both sides and took measurements from each of these marks on the side where we still had the original waterline to then be able to transfer them onto the section we had worked on. With a piece of string, we drew a series of arcs on the new section and were then able to join these arcs up to reinstate the waterline. We taped along our new line and made adjustments by eye with more tape here and a Stanley knife there so that our curve matched the curve on the other side.

Anti-fouling

With the waterline drawn back in, I could now get started on finishing underneath the waterline. I started with a coat of Gelshield to seal and protect the exposed laminate. For the antifouling, I had chosen Nautix products, the hull would be in white and the keel and rudders in fluorescent orange to meet the Classe Mini's stipulation of a bright colour (red, orange, pink or yellow) on these surfaces.

But before I could apply the antifouling, I had to apply a primer to promote adhesion of the antifoul paint to the hull. I found this paint difficult to work with - it was very thick and the instructions on the tin suggested that it was possible to apply without thinning down at all. This was a mistake and it went much better once I added thinners to the paint. I got better coverage and the finish was better because the rollers stopped flaking apart.

I was working with a 4 inch foam roller and it surprised me that there was a huge difference to the roller refills I bought in the builders' merchant compared to the ones I bought in the chandlery. The chandlery ones resisted the paint much better and seemed to absorb much less of it. I also tried mohair rollers and I preferred these because they absorbed even less paint and were stiffer making it easier to move the paint around. However, the finish wasn't quite as consistent with the mohair roller as with the foam roller.

I was wearing my face mask and full overalls so painting was hot work - luckily the temperature inside the shed was lower than outside otherwise I would have cooked and even inside, the paint was almost drying faster than I could put it on! This did however mean that I was able to get a good few coats on and I managed to finish applying the white anti-fouling in a day and the orange fluo patch around the keel in a day.

After the hull came the rudders and the keel which were going to be orange fluo under the water. I had re-faired the rudders at home and we had re-faired the keel after extending the trailing edge. The rudders were easier because I was able to mount them in their brackets and paint all the surfaces whereas the keel was on a pallet board so I had to paint first all the surfaces I could access and then 3 of us were able to turn the keel (weighing a cool 411kg) on its side so I could paint the bottom.

Inside

There was more taping to do on the inside but there was much less painting to do than on the outside. I was applying a sealing coat of G4 (transparent yellowish sealant) to the new glass we had laid down except for the parts I'd decided to paint white to break up the monotony of the composite.

The new resin surface was extremely thirsty and seemed to absorb all the paint on my brush. And although it wasn't a huge area I was painting, I was again glad of my mask because the paint fumes inside the boat were incredibly strong. I needed 2 coats to get proper coverage of the surface so that meant letting it dry and retaping and then painting again (always lots of little steps!).

Topsides

The last thing we would paint would be the topsides in white to cover our repair work on the bow section above the waterline. But first we needed to fully smooth out the surface which meant applying some more layers of high-build primer (light grey) to build-up the last remaining low spots.

Then it was time to colour-match the existing gelcoat and to get the paint. Since I couldn't take the boat to the paint shop (Cory's Car Paints), I polished my tiller and took that so that we would be able to match the white on the tiller to one of the whites on the swatches. Because if you've been into any paint supplier, you'll know that there isn't just one colour of white, there are very many: some yellowy, some more grey, some brilliant white. Cory's have a full swatch card deck just of different whites!

In the end, after looking through the swatches (dazzling work in the sunlight), it turned out that the white on the tiller matched pretty closely to the unmixed standard "white" aka "TC10". So that's what we went for.

Back in the yard, it was time to cover up everything that wasn't going to be sprayed. And I picked up some tricks of the trade from Andy. The first thing to tape down is the brown paper which covers the areas directly adjacent to the surface being sprayed. If you use plastic sheeting here, the overspray on the sheeting doesn't dry and then when you take the sheeting off, you spoil the finished surface, so we used paper. Then it's really handy if you can tape the paper an inch outside of the area to spray so that you can then run another line of tape inside the paper to outline the area to be sprayed. This allows you to take off the line of tape once you've finished spraying and then to wait for everything to cure before taking off the paper.