Ready or not - its time to varnish

Cleaned up and awaiting the first coat of varnish

As I am building the PMD I am discovering that perfection has limitations. It is not as though I don't see what could be done to get it just a tad better, cleaner - more prefect.

Yes, I see that tiny blemish. But you can take perfection only so far. After all, it's a boat that wants to be sailed and rowed.
 
No doubt, beginning with the first outing, the hull will collect little dings and bumps... (normal stuff) things that most onlookers won't even notice, except for when the beholder is the self-same one who erstwhile toiled over the higher degrees of flawlessness.

After first coat of varnish

So, I spent a day, cleaning up little spots - let's call them "items" -  which could probably be glossed over but they bothered me a tad too much and -  I was not prepared to forget about them.

In fact, there were a couple of items where I was appalled that they had escaped my attention previously. Finally though, time had arrived where the frog goes splish into the High Gloss Schooner Varnish.

Somehow I misunderstood the "foam" instruction to mean that the varnish was to be rolled on. I don't think that that was actually the case. In fact, I had already purchased an extra supply of foam rollers since I had run out of them on the third coat of paint. Well, I ended up brushing on the varnish. I'm sure I'll find a tiny spot here or there that I might have missed. No worries, there will be about 5 coats of varnish on this boat. [Since initially posting this entry, I received helpful info from CLC that I'll share in the next blog entry.]

We'll see how it goes with the second coat.

Once again, there will be obligatory sanding in between each coat, so I'll expect to be in this phase for some time. After that all that remains - more or less - are the peripherals, i.e. foils, spars, fittings and trailer. I have already started to work on the first two but have not yet ordered the trailer.

At this point I am reasonably confident that I'll get the PMD into water before April - provided that the ice on the lake has melted by then... thinking warm thoughts.