Roof paintwork repairs

It was dry, warm and sunny today, so we could have gone cruising, but such days seem so infrequent at the moment that I thought I ought to start on the backlog of painting on Herbie.  The roof in particular is not good at all.  The job had  been held up by the weeping willow fronds draped all over the boat, but good old Steve at the marina and his mate showed up on Sunday and gave the tree a haircut so I was able to go ahead.

First thing was the flashes on the side of the bow (the foretop bend I think the aficionados call it).  Stupidly I always forget to take before and after pics, so we'll have to be content with the afters.

Looking back through the blog, I see that it was just ten years ago that I painted them in this pattern! Over the ten years they'd aged a bit like I have and were in sore need of a refresher, which I often am too. They were was very scratched and faded before, but I'm happy with this side now. The one on the other side isn't so good and will require a second go later.  The worst bit of doing jobs like that is the masking up.  In the words of Neil Sedaka (almost), masking up is hard to do, especially when you have to reach at arms length across the water.

Then it was on to the roof, which has become very scabby in places. A lot of sanding was required to get rid of rusty and flaky bits and the roof is a big area, so I settled on a particularly bad patch and attacked that.  Following the advice of the revered Mr Phil Speight, boat painter extraordinaire, I adopted the practice of masking off a neat rectangle which included a number of flaky /rusty bits and after sanding , washing, sugar soaping, rinsing, drying and all that palaver, I turned to my new acquisition, a tin of Hammerite No1 Rust Beater.  They claim it primes and undercoats in one go, and you can paint it on top of rust!  I hope I got rid of all the rust first but belt and braces can do no harm.  Anyway it went on nicely in a thickish coat and brushed out well, so I'm quite pleased with it.  I'll probably put another coat on later, followed by a Craftmaster Raddle top coat or two across the whole roof when other nasty bits have been attended to.  The neat rectangle looks a lot better than the patchy splodges you see on many boats at this stage of the proceedings don't you think?

I was knackered at the end, but so was Kath as she had been inside the boat doing a spring clean.  There's loads more to do of course, but you have to start somewhere.  The rain gutters come next, they need a lot of work.  Sadly the met men forecast rain tomorrow so I wont resume until Wednesday at least.