Yosemite in February

Tracy here, interrupting the canoe blog again... This weekend we took our once-a-winter trip to Yosemite. When you stay at the Wawona Hotel you can curl up by the fire with a drink after a good day of skiing at Badger pass and listen to Tom Bopp tell stories and play old Yosemite tunes on the piano. It's so relaxing there. The food in the dining room is outstanding too! Somehow we scored the biggest room in the hotel, which also seems to be the one with the slantiest floor. We skated about halfway out to Glacier Point on Saturday and the weather was great. Some day I'll be fit enough to make it the whole way out. I hear there's a big hill right at the end, though. Anyway there's a spot with a good view of the Clark Range that makes a good turning-around point for wimps like me.

Scraping the inside

Work on the canoe has been going pretty slowly in January. I've been running a lot more these days and it takes up time on the weekend. The coming Presidents' Day long weekend should be productive. Tracy has promised to help me with fiberglassing the inside on Saturday, Valentine's Day. Now that is true love! And I've got an appointment with Andy in Santa Cruz on Monday to machine the gunwales. After calling a couple places, I haven't been able to find any Ash or Cherry boards longer than 14 feet so I will have to scarf together a couple to get the full length of the canoe. I'll try to get some from Minton's on Saturday even though they never called me back about getting longer boards. The guy at Jackel in Watsonville was good about getting back to me, but Minton's is less than a mile away.

Since flipping the canoe over I have scraped and sanded the inside. I tried with my cabinet scrapers first, but whether it was my technique or the scrapers, it wasn't getting the job done, especially on the epoxy globs that had seeped through the staple holes. So following the advice of countless people on the Bear Mountain builders' forum I ordered a Pro-Prep scraper. It was much more effective although I still found it difficult to get as nice shavings as I do from a plane. Sharpening the Pro-Prep with my diamond block gave a super-sharp edge for slicing through the epoxy. The image after scraping is above. I have also sanded and it looks a thousand times better now, but I don't have a photo yet.