The keel on the Grand Banks 42 has finally gotten dry enough forward to begin the repairs. We need to get this together so this boat can leave. The parts that are dry enough were sealed yesterday and hopefully by tomorrow the aft end will be “drip-free”. Another task yesterday was to load a Welcraft on a newly acquired trailer and adjust it. The boat has been sitting for quite a while so it needed a real good bath and we will probably need to dispose of the old gas to get it to run properly.   We stopped cutting tanks out with saws a long time ago because of the debris (and the labor) but plasma cutting also has it’s own by product – smoke and fumes. We found that creating a plastic tent inside the boat and running an exhaust fan during the job protects the interior. We are now ready for the plasma guy to arrive. This boat had some serious flaking as you can see by the amount of primer we used to fill in the scraped areas. Someone had removed the gate keepers on this GB handrail after many years of service. The smart money would have been to sand the area smooth before varnishing – you can see how many times this rail has been sanded around the old keeper.