I had to add another padeye on the starboard side of the mast for the main sheet. The block I'd put there before led the sheet across the Reef One clew line as it fell down from the boom. When the boom was over to starboard,
the lines would chafe.

You can see here that the new block leads the sheet across where the other block sat. So I had to pull both of those turning blocks off.
They were cluttering things up anyway, and interfering with the new blocks that are all over the mast collar.

So what's that round pad doing where the block used to be? Well, it's just another idea that didn't work.

Patching the holes over the epoxy plugs would be tough. The block on the port side was installed over an old piece of hardware, so there were actually 8 epoxy plugs in that little area. Gel coat would probably not stick to the epoxy, so I'd have to grind down around the epoxy plugs to get a polyester to polyester bond.
I'd end up with a poppy patch of 1 inch circles.

So just for grins I cut two 3 1/2 inch disks from 1/4 inch fiberglass and figured I'd do a little experiment, and if it looked okay I'd just bolt the disks down. MiniCraft in Florida has a number of custom gel coat mixes available for all sorts of boats. I gave them my Hull ID Number, but they couldn't find a match in the files. Figures. We took a shot at "smoke white" used on a lot of C&C decks. As you can see
to the right, it wasn't a good match.
Even with cheap sunglasses
in Mexico on a good day..

It's easy to tint things darker, but darn near impossible to tint things lighter! To see if I could, I added 100 drops of white tint to 2 oz. of gelcoat, but it didn't make a
noticeable difference.

Oh well. I could mix it in with some pure white Gel Coat, but to be honest I'd be spending more and more money on another experiment, and I want to be sailing this boat in three weeks. Nothing is going to slow that down.

So for now, I completely filled the holes with epoxy, and set some machine screws in the holes so I can just screw down a plate to cover the ugly and protect the epoxy from UV degradation. I covered the screws with Pam so they wouldn't stick to the epoxy and I could easily take them out, but the important thing is that the deck is totally sealed -- even with the screw holes.

I just made a plate out of 1/8 inch polyethylene, screwed it down. I'm going sailing.

I'm sure this will look awful in a year. Believe me, if you've waded through this web site and made it this far, you know I'll think of something to make it "just exactly right."

But NOTHING is going to keep me from sailing this boat on May 18, 2002. This will work for now.