The Whiteness of the Whale ......... 30th August 2012
Well, the boat certainly seems as big as a whale when you get
started on polishing the topsides or fiberglass. During an ‘interesting interlude’ this
morning when Mike and the mechanic Doug from Morris seemed to be doing their
best to bring the mast crashing down, I decided
that it would be better to work on removing the sticky residue left behind by
the masking tape. We had applied this
lovely blue tape to the fiberglass to keep the varnish from going everywhere
when we were working on varnishing the toe rail. We had been advised to use the best quality
tape otherwise varnish would be drawn underneath by capillary action. Well what a product it turned out to be. Indeed we don’t seem to have had the problem
of varnish creeping under the tape.
However, when the tape was removed—presto a sticky residue all along the
edge of the fiberglass. This, as you
might imagine, attracted every piece of dust, dirt and bug for yards
around. So I set to work to
start removing this with some Marine fiberglass cleaner. In about an hour I managed to remove perhaps
1 foot of this unsightly goo. That
masking tape was really value for money…
All this led me to thinking about the whiteness of the
boat. What chap (pardon my assumption)
thought that fiberglass boats should be white?
Do we not naturally avoid those bright white items like white sweaters
and white shoes? We know that within
minutes they will look all grubby and repulsive. The problem of keeping white things looking
good is even more extreme with boats. All
manner of things seem to land on the boat from sky, sea, shoe bottoms or bird
bottoms. Most of these seem to be
variations of smudge brown. So why do we
not start off with smudge brown boats and take life easier? Now that I think about it, did we not start
off making boats from wood? This brown
material is well known for its ability to hide ‘smudges’—consider the hardwood
floor. We took a wrong turn somewhere in
the matter of fiberglass construction.
Southwest Harbor, Mt Desert Island
Gloria putting on the sail cover
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