Boat labor of love

What does John do when he isn't working on computers?  Anything Sailboats! Teaching kids how to sail.  The last couple of years this has also included restoring old sailboats.  Boy did we find a big project for this past winter.  We picked up a 1978 E-scow. Yep 30 years old fiberglass with 7 layers of bad paint on it.  Here is what it looked like when we got it:

 

 

We flipped it over, painted it, then flipped it back, here is one of the flipping photos:

 

 

Then we painted the top, put hundreds of pulleys and cleats back on. All of the ropes(lines to us sailors) were rotten from being outside for years. So 1200 feet of new ropes added, and we finished the project in under 6 months!

This Saturday we took it out for the first time.

Yes this is a 30 year old boat, 32 year old sails.  We had a blast.  With everyone's help, we had probably over 300 hours of work on it.

 

 

The kids want to go fast on the new/old toy.   There is a national association of this kind of boat www.e-scow.org  and teenagers do what teenagers do on these things.  Go check out this video, yep my kids want to do that next on ours.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Cool photos, John!  Congrats on completing that project!  I would love to take it for a ride next time I find myself in your area. -Kevin