All hands on deck

The last few weeks have ben focussed on laying the deck. We decided early on that we would lay a teak deck , and, as there is always a choice about these things, the question was what style ? Fully swept, semi swept, straightlaid ? Well the answer was rather dictated for us due to the nature of the teak. We had purchased 34mm wide, 6mm deep teak decking and as you will have seen on previous photographs a Golant Gaffer is a curvy thing. As it turned out a bit too curvy for the teak we had. D had some trial runs with bending the teak (steamed and unsteamed) but it either exploded or straightened itself out. Consequently the decision was we would rather have a properly bonded straight laid deck. So the next choice was for bedding and calking and due to technical considerations, we chose to bed onto and caulk with epoxy with graphite added (to make it dark grey). The deck strips were cut to fit and spaced with 5mm tile spacers. Once bedded onto the epoxy, they were temporarily fixed down with screws and washers (screws between the planks I hasten to add and the washers applying downward pressure to the decking).  When bonded to the deck the screws were removed and the epoxy caulking applied and the screw holes injected with epoxy. The majority of the surplus epoxy was removed with a chisel and finally the deck was sanded.


 The photograph below shows the laying of the deck with the washers to apply downward pressure on the planking.

The two shots below show the aft decking laid out with tile spacers and (left) and finally caulked and sanded with the horse fitted onto small pads let into the decking.

 The shots below shows the start of sanding the foredeck and also the prism light for the forehatch and one of the portholes which arrived recently.