I finished with the last coats of varnish on the oars, and I painted the first coat of yellow on the interior of the boat.
I never did figure out a way to put a whole coat of varnish on an entire oar in one lick. Best I was able to do was like half an oar at a time. And not like one side, but more in the way of doing the blade and the leathers in one go, and then the other parts of the loom in the other go. So three coats of varnish took six application sessions. And they’re done now.
And I finally braved painting the inside of the boat. I think a big part of my reluctance to paint the inside was how the inside of the boat collects dirt and gritch and such. It was easy enough to blow all that off the bottom and sides of the boat when it was upside down, and it’s not so easy to get it out of the boat when it’s right-side up and catches all that stuff like a big bucket. I finally dragged the vacuum out to the garage and sucked up all the stuff inside the boat.
And with that I put down the first coat on the inside. It looks a little better in the pictures, at least the small thumbnails inline the text here. But it surely needs another coat. I hope just one more coat.
I’d had some ideas as to painting the inside of the transom red, but I got lazy and didn’t. It would have involved taping between the transom and the rest of the inside getting the yellow, as well as taking two more weeks at least doing more red. I’m not sure I even remember why I wanted to do two-tone inside the hull. I think maybe it had something to do with the aluminum parts for the wheels being on both sides of the transom. Yeah, I think that was it.
