I posted here a bit back looking for input on whether I should restore a 19' Bartender hull that had been benignly neglected down in California. Passing owner to owner, it had never been finished. The owner previous realized he would never finish the boat and wanted it to go to a good home. That's me. It looked pretty rough but I had a guy volunteer to check it out for me and he said the conditionn was very good and excellent for the price. I decided to go for it.




I drove down to Davenport just north of Santa Cruz to pick it up. After buying a trailer in Santa Cruz I headed to Davenport. As you can see it wasn't the easiest job to get it out.




We ended up using a forklift. The guys at the mill assured me that the operator was a maestro with a lift. He would pick up the bow and we slid ger out on her bunks as far as we could. There were some very scary moments. Formost being when we had extended the tines with some light boards and the lift was fully raised trying to get the boat up and over the wood you can see stacked in the first picture and the boards were buckling and swaying under the weight of the boat about 12 feet in the air. The photo shows after we reinforced the boards with some larger ones. In the end it was uneventful and we got it on the trailer. That was when I had my "what am I getting myself into" moment.




Some monkeying artound and jerry rigging and I left davenport at 6:30 pm for the drive to Thurston. I drove it home all night, sleot two hourts and got to work right away cleaning it up. It actually started to look halfway decent on the exterior as I went at it with a scrubbrush:





The next step was to start cleaning out the hull. Which had largely already been done in the photo above. I scraped away the dirt and accumulated debris and vacumed it out. I am also sanding the interior of the hull. It looks pretty good all things considered:



Most of the wood is quite sound. The hull is made of an excellent quality, incredibly tight grained douglas-fir marine ply. Amazingly, many portions have not checked in spite of being thirty years old and never being sealed. The ribs and all the trim are mahogany. The bottom frame members have some dry rot and I plan on replacing all of them with fir. It is going to be painted after all. Fortunately that is largely the extent of any damge. I am also going to barrier coat everthing with epoxy, put in celings, floor and floorboards and go fishing . I also plan on replacing the fiberglass perhaps with a heavier cloth.

I am certain I will be seeking advice from some f the restoration experts on here. Thanks.