At some point, all of us classic-boat owners are faced with the expensive, time-consuming task of replacing the decks.

Teak is the preferred material, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I was faced with this predicament 20 years ago, when the teak decks on Searcher, our Bowman 57 ketch, needed to be replaced. The teak on the working decks was 30 years old and getting paper-thin. Bungs were missing, screwheads were showing, and the seam caulking was coming adrift.

So, I went looking for teak options. One alternative was cheap, plastic linoleum that tried to look like teak. There was real African teak or iroko, greenheart and tigerwood, but these, I thought, were better suited for a patio deck. Costa Rican teak might cost around $160 per square meter. I could have saved that money and instead painted the decks with antislip, but I never liked its look or effectiveness.

In 2004, I replaced the teak on the bow and working decks with Lewmar’s Treadmaster, an aggressively nonslip decking material with a diamond pattern. It comes in 3-by-4-foot sheets, is easily cut with a knife or shears, and is glued down over metal or fiberglass decks with a two-part epoxy. It’s maintenance-free and inexpensive.

A square meter of Treadmaster costs around $200. Teak is about the same, but far more labor-intensive and might require hiring professionals at $90 an hour. Treadmaster, I could install myself.

It took me a month to remove the old teak and fair the fiberglass decks, which were severely damaged during the removal process. I also had to remove and rebed the jib sheet tracks and other deck fittings.

Once the decks were faired, I drew out the pattern on the deck in pencil, cut out pieces of brown wrapping paper to fit, taped them down, and took a look. Nice. I then labeled the templates and the deck, and cut the Treadmaster to match. It took me a week to epoxy the Treadmaster panels in place, weighting them down with sandbags. Done.

Today, all I have to do is hose it off. But don’t fall on it, or you’ll wind up with a diamond imprint on your knees.

Another Option for Teak Decks

Five years later, the teak on the aft deck and the cockpit seats needed replacing. I wasn’t about to use Treadmaster here, with aesthetic considerations and soft behinds to take into account.

I found Stazo marinedeck, a Dutch product that’s available here in the United States. The distributor was in Thomaston, Maine, just 10 miles down the coast. This marine decking is made from compressed cork combined with a binder. It looks like teak (well, close enough) and comes in strips and sheets, all one-third of an inch thick. It does not absorb moisture, is much lighter, is a better insulator, is maintenance-free and is cooler underfoot than teak. After 15 years, all it needed was a light sanding to return to its original condition.

I also found it less expensive than teak, at $400 a square meter. It was easily cut and shaped, and I could do the installation myself. 

For that project, it took me two weeks just to remove the teak and fair the fiberglass subsurface. Cutting and fitting the cork was fun, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. This part, I did dry: cutting the strips, fitting them in place and numbering each one with corresponding numbers on the deck. 

Then began the messy part: applying tubes of deck caulk in a caulking gun, spreading out the gooey stuff with a serrated trowel over a small section of deck, fitting a few strips in place and applying pressure, scraping up the goo that oozed out, and spreading it over the next section.

When I asked the guys at a nearby yard for suggestions, they told me they used their wives’ old dresses as smocks. “You’ll get this stuff all over yourself,” they warned. I did.

Once the cork was placed and rolled out, it needed a few days to cure. The next step involved filling and troweling the seams. This created a real mess. I began by taping the seams but then gave up, as troweling the caulk just spread the stuff outside the tape. The decks were covered in black goo. 

After a few days, the seam compound had set, and I hit the entire deck with a belt sander. It was a joy to watch the new and now-clean decks emerge from the black mess I’d created.

After 14 years of ownership and three voyages down to and back from the Eastern Caribbean, I sold Searcher in 2014. The boat sat neglected by the buyer in a Belgian marina for eight years after that. Matthi Pieters, a Belgian shipwright, then acquired it, and over the next two years, he rebuilt a significant portion of the boat’s interior, excluding the decks.

Matthi shared his progress with me and other Bowman 57 owners in our Facebook group. He recently sent me photos and this report: “We had to do some work on the cork deck, but now it looks very good again. There were some little gaps in the seams, which we cut out and filled. Water had gotten under some planks in the cockpit, which we removed and re-bedded. After a light sanding, the cork looks new. Some of the Treadmaster decking had become porous and discolored. So, we painted it with a thin epoxy. The edges of some sections of the Treadmaster were lifting. We need to re-epoxy these to fix the edges. Next summer, we’ll repaint the entire deck. The best thing would be to replace the Treadmaster. But to save costs, we try it this way for now.”

I wrote to Matthi recently about a newer product: Treadmaster’s Treadcote, an epoxy paint. It’s Lewmar’s answer to restoring heavily weathered and stained original Treadmaster decking.

Searcher has been renamed We’ll Sea and is now back in the water, with a new engine and rebuilt interior. The jade-green hull is now painted light gray. Matthi and his family sailed We’ll Sea from Belgium to London this past summer, with plans for more ambitious adventures down the road. 

She may have lost her teak, but she’s gained a new lease on life, and she’ll have a few more stories to tell from the other side of the spray.    

Based in Maine, David H. Lyman has owned and sailed four yachts in his more than half a decade of cruising in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

The post Teak Deck Replacement Options for Classic Cruisers appeared first on Cruising World.

Take a stroll through any high-end marina just about anywhere in the world, and you’re bound to get an eyeful of polished teak trim adorning the luxury yachts you see. But ask Mal Haddad, Vice President, and Head of Design and Development at Westminster Teak—an American company that designs, builds and imports high-end furniture from Indonesia—if you should consider gleaming, varnished teak chairs and tables for your deck or patio, and he’ll just scoff and ask if you have paid crew at home to keep it all rich and shiny-looking.

He likens such glossy furniture—while fine for indoor use—to a high-end fighting chair you might find on a chartered fishing boat. With 12 coats of varnish, it looks beautiful for the day or two you’re aboard, but what you don’t see is that as soon as you leave, the crew is busy washing it down, or sanding and revarnishing any dings so that it looks as rich and luxurious for the next customer. The key to the best investment in acquiring teak furniture is knowledge about the material, craftsmanship in the furniture, and ease in its maintenance. A well designed and beautifully crafted piece of teak furniture endures over time, season after season, year after year, long after trends are forgotten.

Outdoors and in the elements, the real beauty of the wood, he says, is its high oil content and grain structure, which gives untreated teak its longevity and tendency to weather to a lovely gray patina in a wide range of climates, and with very little maintenance. To care for your outdoor furniture, all you have to do is scrub it with dish soap and water, using a soft brush, every couple of months to remove airborne dirt and stains. Don’t, he cautioned, oil the teak, because moisture can find its way under the surface and cause mold or mildew that will stain the wood.

A native of Singapore, Haddad says that a recent trip home gave him the opportunity to see some of the teak furniture again that his parents had around their home when he was a boy. “It looks the same,” he says, “and it’s been around for more than 100 years.”

When it comes to his design philosophy, Haddad takes a long view. Rather than trendy styles that fall quickly into disfavor, or materials such as plastic and wire that show their age after a season or two, he embraces practicality and longevity that, like his parents’ furniture, looks good and is comfortable for decades. Haddad goes on to share, “Good design should be as relevant now as it was 50 years ago and 50 years from now. The designs are as timeless and enduring as the material itself.”

“As a raw material, teak lasts far longer than the average resin-based wicker or metal furniture that is environmentally less eco-friendly,” Haddad noted in a white paper that he wrote for the company. “Its high oil and silica content make it highly resistant to rotting, warping or splitting, allowing it to withstand the extremities of weather including sun, rain, and snow…. It’s high natural oil content also means it has a comparatively low coefficient of thermal expansion; it does not expand and contract, warp, split, or crack, in humid environments, in contact with water, or even when submerged [in water] over extended periods of time.”

Because of its longevity for outdoor uses, Haddad says that teak is a naturally sustainable building material. But, he adds, Westminster Teak is committed to sustainability in a broader sense of the word. The teak it uses in its factory comes from certified plantations under the management of the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry.

“We purchase wood only from sustainably harvested plantations that are managed and credibly certified by the Ministry of Forestry of Indonesia, ensuring 100 percent transparency as to the origins of the wood, from forest to showroom floor,” Haddad says.

“Our factory was the first to join Nusa Hijau, the Indonesian Chapter of the Global Forest Trade Network (GFTN), an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund. It was created to eliminate illegal logging, improve the management of threatened forests, and promote biodiversity and the livelihoods of the people that depend on them,” he notes.

Westminster Teak also works only with factories that can account for the well-being and medical care of their employees and their families. “In the long run, companies themselves cannot continue to be viable and claim support for sustainability only for the environment without consideration to those who are actually working for them, regardless of whether they are in the fields or factories,” he adds.

But in the end, for Haddad and Westminster Teak, the value of the furniture all comes back to Haddad’s concepts of timeless designs.

“Product knowledge is key in understanding the investment value proposition a beautifully crafted piece of teak furniture brings,” he says. “While retaining a select few from our ‘old classics,’ our design team is constantly working to create furniture that evokes simple sophistication and casual elegance.”

The post For Yachts or Home, Teak Stands the Test of Time appeared first on Cruising World.

Rain, sun, hot days, cold nights, freezing temperatures, even snow and hail—yikes the elements can be hard on wood that’s left outdoors for months or years at a time by design.

We sailors know all too well the toll that the elements can take on the exterior wood that adorns our boats, which is why for centuries those who could afford it have chosen teak for its durability in topsides applications and for its natural good looks, resistance to rot, and strength when used for furniture and structural panels belowdecks.

“Teak loves water,” says Mal Haddad, vice president of Westminster Teak, a high-end furniture design and manufacturing company based in Live Oak, Florida. Haddad notes that it’s those very qualities appreciated by sailors that make teak an ideal choice for outdoor furniture at home, no matter where you live. Left with its natural finish, oil rises to the surface of the wood, its high oil content and relatively low coefficient of thermal expansion means teak can withstand large swings in temperature. In other words, it can be left outdoors year-round, even in snow-covered regions, without the wood warping, shrinking or expanding.

Haddad, with a background in industrial and ocean engineering, grew up in Singapore, where as a boy he was surrounded by exotic woods—especially teak—at the shipyard where his father built oceangoing tugs. After attending college here in the States, Haddad worked as a consultant to telecommunications companies and traveled extensively, but as a hobby, he began to design and build teak furniture, eventually opening a studio and gallery in Florida that was tailored to interior designers and other furniture makers. It was at the studio that he met Jim TenBroeck, who founded Westminster Teak in 1997. It took some persuasion, Haddad said, but eventually, 16 years ago, he brought his design skills to the company full time as vice president. Today, many of the designs in Westminster’s catalog are his.

And on the subject of design, Haddad is passionate. Because of teak’s longevity, furniture built from it will last years longer than pieces made from metals such as aluminum, or even plastics, he says. So, Westminster favors timeless styles that won’t fall in and out of favor, depending on the trend of the day. Several of Westminster’s designs date back to the company’s early days, and new models are introduced only after a lot of thought has gone into them.

Besides having a large collection of teak furniture of his own, Haddad says that he also collects bowls—not only as art, but as utensils that he uses around the house. Comparing bowls to furniture, he says: “It is an object you live with … and love! That’s good design.”

In the marine industry, recently the trend in production-boat building has been to find teak alternatives for decks, trim and interiors. This is due in part to cost, but also because of concerns about the availability and sustainability of the wood itself.

Haddad, though, is equally passionate about the environmental benefits and sustainability of properly grown and harvested teak. From the outset, Westminster has had a strategic partnership with an Indonesian factory that was the first to join Nusa Hijau, the Indonesian chapter of the Global Forest Trade Network. All its teak comes from sustainably harvested plantations in Java, Indonesia. Those plantations are managed by the Ministry of Forestry, Perum Perhutani, and every process of the teakwood, from forest to retail floor, is monitored and certified by third party technical organizations. Sustainability, he adds, also means making sure workers both in the plantations and in the factories are treated fairly and paid a living wage.

When people think of teak, Haddad says, they often think of luxury yachts and the lustrous, rich look of high-gloss varnished teak furniture and trim. That, says Haddad, is fine for wealthy owners who can afford to hire crew to cover chairs and tables when they’re not being used, or to frequently sand and revarnish rails and whatnot.

But teak, he says, will do just fine on its own if left unfinished outdoors and allowed to weather over time and develop a handsome silvery gray patina—a look that he says he prefers as it complements beautifully with the landscape of the outdoors , and often what is found aboard yachts with teak decks.

Upkeep is minimal, he says. All you need to do is wash down the teak a couple of times a year with dish soap and water, using a soft-bristle scrub brush to remove airborne dirt and the like. Don’t, he says, oil the teak for outdoor use, because moisture can find its way under the surface and cause mold or mildew that will stain the wood and difficult to remove. 

His advice for a homeowner: Invest in good-quality, well-designed outdoor furniture. Sit in it and enjoy its look and feel because it will be with you for a good long time.

For more information about Westminster Teak, visit their website at westminsterteak.com.

The post Teak: Good for Your Boat, Good for Your Home appeared first on Cruising World.

I was at the marina recently, prepping Delilah‘s sunburned, 50-year-old teak for varnish. It was Tuesday morning in Los Angeles and, for a few precious moments, I was showing all the signs of a competent, mechanically capable man who can do his own boat work. 

One foot on the dock, the other on the boat, I leaned, reached and began to remove a small section of old varnish from Delilah‘s toe rail. But, as the boat drifted on its dock lines, my reaching turned to stretching; stretching turned to an ever-widening, yoga-like stance; and, soon, I was doing my closest approximation of the splits. I fell on the boat. My heat gun fell in the drink. Birds scattered as a small, high-pitched scream came out of me. 

And this, friends, was Day One of my teak maintenance experience.

Over the following days and weeks, small failures turned to fiasco as I assembled a growing list of mishaps, silly mistakes and minor middle-aged injuries. After stripping, sanding and cleaning the toe rail, handrails and cabin top trim, I left my freshly-prepped teak uncovered in the rain. Does it rain in LA? Yeah, it poured for a week. When the storm was over, I removed my blue tape and pulled off large sections of deck paint. I slipped up and scratched Delilah‘s hull with a palm sander, and I drained an entire tin of acetone in my dock box.

Can you see a pattern? I could, and it drove me nuts. 

Truth was, my work was amateur at best. Delilah‘s teak would probably never look as good as the day I bought her. Also, I live 25 miles from the marina. In LA traffic, it takes me approximately 16 hours to get to the boat. Sure, I was halfway through the toe rail and trim, but I hadn’t even started on the cockpit combings. 

“How’s it going?” a dock mate asked. 

I’d been off-and-on at the project for two weeks, was finishing my third coat of varnish, and listening to dangerous amounts of Emo. 

“The boat’s looking good,” he said. “You wanna take a break and come sailing with us?”

We raced around the buoys that evening. On the final stretch, maybe 300 yards from the finish line, the wind shut off and we were becalmed. As the sun disappeared, I held a limp jib sheet and remembered a passage from a Robert Pirsig book: “Zen is the spirit of the valley, not the mountaintop,” he wrote. “The only zen you find at the top of a mountain is the zen you bring up there.”

Back at the dock, I cleaned up my tools in the dark, then slept on the boat. In the morning, I walked to coffee and got an early start on my fourth coat of varnish. Only, this time, I opened the wrong can and brushed on the wrong product. Blame the universe? Blame others? Blame myself? Truth was, the spilled acetone had taken the labels off the cans. 

I keep a book of poetry on the boat. Sometimes I read it. Sometimes it’s a photo prop. This time, it was a self-help kit. “We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what’s before us,” Mark Nepo writes, “because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.”

A week earlier, I might have cried over the mistake. But this time, I stopped, looked around and laughed. On a nearby dock, sea lions were waking; a small family of ducks was floating past. In the trees, birds chirped. All around me, there was light, air, moving water, the miracle of life.

I sat down, smiled, and watched the varnish dry. After all, what could be better?

Click here to read more from The Noob Files

David Blake Fischer is a “noob” sailor living in Southern California whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed, the Moth, and Good Old Boat. He hasn’t crossed oceans. In fact, he’s only recently crossed the Santa Monica Bay. Follow him as he fumbles out the channel, backwinds his jib and sometimes drags his fenders on Delilah, his Cape Dory 25. Stalk him on Instagram.

The post Zen and the Art of Teak Toe Rail Maintenance appeared first on Cruising World.

Like many Taiwanese boats built in the 1980s, my Kaufman 47, Quetzal, was slathered in teak. Side decks, foredeck, cabin trunk, handrails, coamings — a veritable forest afloat. As someone capable of rationalizing almost anything, and because I was able to buy the boat for a great price, I not only accepted the abundance of teak, I embraced it. Of course I knew that practical-minded sailors scorned external wood; indeed, I was one of them before I felt the magic of teak beneath my bare feet, at least on cloudy days when the decks were not scalding. And yes, I knew that teak decks were becoming scarce on new boats and seen as a liability on older boats. But that didn’t stop me from bragging about teak’s unrivaled nonskid capabilities and excellent insulating properties. And I loved the aesthetic, boasting that a handsome renewable resource like teak softened the cold, oil-derived glare of a utilitarian fiberglass deck. I was more than a teak-deck apologist; I was a teak-deck snob.

I bought the boat in 2003, and to my dismay, my decks started to show signs of wear and tear just a few years later. I sail a lot, around 10,000 miles a year, and the decks were subjected to cascades of seawater washing over them and the roughshod treatment of an offshore training vessel doing her job, scribbling rhumb lines across the Atlantic. Although I tried, I couldn’t ignore the screw heads appearing under sprung bungs, the raised and missing caulking on the foredeck and a couple of weathered planks that had splintered. But it was a mugging in Trinidad that hastened the demise of my teak dreams.

I left the boat on the hard for a couple of weeks and hired a highly recommended chap to lightly sand the decks, reseat a few fasteners, replace missing bungs and caulk the worst sections. I returned to a crime scene. My beautiful teak decks had been attacked by a belt sander armed with 16-grit assault paper and smeared with black caulk. At first I wanted to cry, then I wanted to commit a crime of my own. But the damage was done, the life of the decks shortened and, when Quetzal slinked out of Chaguaramas like a shorn English sheep dog, I vowed never again to commission work from a contractor I didn’t know, especially when I was thousands of miles away from the yard.

I kept sailing and mending as I went, but the decks became more and more of an eyesore. When they started to leak, I knew something had to be done. My friends and shipmates grew weary of my incessant fretting over the decks. “Stop complaining and do something,” I told myself, but I could not decide what to do.

I considered replacing them with new fastener-free decks manufactured from templates and mounted with adhesives. These modern teak decks are lovely in every respect except price. When I received an estimate from Teak Decking Systems of $55,000 to $60,000, I became less of a teak-deck snob.

I looked into synthetic teak, also known as fake teak, and was impressed by its appearance and practicality. I gathered a box full of samples and laid them on deck like playing cards. But after boasting about real teak for years, I just couldn’t pull the trigger on installing a synthetic replacement.

I looked seriously at cork and invited myself aboard several aluminum and steel boats to inspect their cork decks. Cork is a natural, sustainable product, but it’s also expensive, the installation seemed beyond my talents and my wife, Tadji, really didn’t like the look. “Cork,” she assured me, “is for wine bottles.”

With the realization that every option required the same process to prepare the sub deck, I finally decided to remove the teak, fill the thousands of fastener holes with epoxy, and fair and then spray the decks with nonskid mixed in the paint. My teak-deck days were behind me, alas. It was on to whiter pastures.

The decision was liberating, but I underestimated what a massive job it was going to be to create a utilitarian, low-maintenance fiberglass deck.

I chose the boatyard at Spring Cove Marina in Solomons, Maryland, just south of Annapolis, for the project. Spring Cove has been Quetzal‘s home away from home, and the talented crew had already made many valuable upgrades and repairs over the years. Full disclosure, the yard is owned and operated by my sister and brother-in-law, Liz and Trevor Richards, vastly experienced sailors who have been cruising off and on aboard their Endurance 37, Wandering Star, (including a circumnavigation) for many years.

My cost-controlling plan called for a mix of DIY and professional work. My friends and I were responsible for the destruction phase of the project, removing the old decks. Time was of the essence, as the gap in my training schedule gave us one month to complete the entire project. The doubters were plenty.

The first step was to pull the mast, haul the boat and block it up in the paint shed. Working under cover freed us from weather concerns. Next, we removed every deck fitting — every cleat, clutch, track, anything mounted directly on teak. Fortunately, designer Mike Kaufman and builder Kha Shing used several solid fiberglass islands to mount high-load winches and the traveler base. Still, this was a time-­consuming process, requiring one person on deck, one below, and the removal of just about every headliner to gain access to the stubborn nuts anchoring the through-bolts.

The next task, removing the teak, filled me with emotion. With a heavy heart and cold chisel in hand, I surveyed the once-beautiful teak deck and sighed, remembering times I’d gone forward to reef the main or set the staysail, always with secure footing.

I imagined a process for removal that combined controlled physical effort with a sense of quality and renewal, something Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, would understand. “A person who sees quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares,” he wrote. I cared. I was even filled with a sense of tranquility; it was going to be OK. I imagined saving teak planks and sending them to former shipmates as keepsakes.

Subscribe Now and Save 50% Limited time offer. Cruising World for iPad included. Gift subscriptions available.

In the most caring of ways, I slipped the chisel under the teak on the coachroof and pried. Nothing happened. I pushed harder; still not much movement. I pushed even harder (I have been accused of having the touch of a Russian midwife) and the chisel popped out and gashed my hand. I cursed, then caught myself. "Come on, Quetzal, I care." I reset the chisel and pushed with all my might. An inch, maybe 2, of teak popped free and cracked at the fastener. Hmm? This was going to require a lot less caring and better tools or it might take a year to strip the teak off.

My team and I regrouped at Lowe’s. Bigger chisels, propelled by 3-pound sledgehammers, started to get results. Then we discovered the rotary hammer and demolition bits. Soon, wood was flying and dust filled the air. So much for Zen and deck souvenirs, this was hand-to-hand combat. The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, became our new playbook. “If you know your enemy, and know yourself, victory will not stand in doubt.” Stubborn teak planks, tenacious old caulk and too many stainless fasteners were the enemy.

My fellow soldiers were dear friends and frequent Quetzal crewmembers. Alan Creaser, from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, was our captain, pushing us through low moments when our knees buckled, backs ached and spirits drooped. Alan, who is currently managing the operations of the legendary Bluenose schooner, reminded us that the original Bluenose, built in 1921, went from "tree to sea in 96 days," crafted entirely with hand tools — surely we could knock off old teak decks in just a few days.

Ron Sorensen, an engineer by trade who has crossed the Atlantic twice aboard Quetzal, has round heels when it comes to my pleas for help. He's a pushover. Bruce Steely fell for Quetzal in the Caribbean, and came to work by boat. His small trawler was loaded with tools, and by the end of the project we had used them all.

I have, unfairly I must say, been accused of being the Tom Sawyer of the sea, working my friends to the bone and offering them nothing but lunch and a few slaps on the back in return. It’s not true. I am in the sail-training business, after all, and I could have been charging them for this invaluable experience. Tom Sawyer wouldn’t have missed an opportunity like that. All joking aside, I am incredibly fortunate to have many talented friends. There is a camaraderie about offshore sailing that breeds genuine friendships.

We have had many shared adventures aboard Quetzal, and those of us who sail her feel a deep connection to her. She's our conduit to blue water and the good life waiting at sea. And when she needs work, we all pitch in. It's just not always easy to explain this utopian ideal to spouses. "You paid this guy how much to sail with him and now you're working on his boat for free?"

By the end of Day Two, the teak was in serious retreat. We had most of the cabin top cleared and were making progress on the more challenging side decks. Nothing about the task was easy. We discovered that leaving fasteners in place and zipping them out with a drill afterward was the best tactic. When the head was stripped, we used vice grips to remove them, and of the 3,000-plus screws that once littered the deck, fewer than 20 remain entombed in fiberglass today.

After four days, every last bit of teak was in the scrap bin. We then went after the remnants of the caulk, a tough slurry concocted in Taiwan, but it couldn't hold out against four determined air sanders. Six days after we started, Quetzal's deck was clean. We didn't rest on the seventh day; we celebrated at the tiki bar down the road, a questionable call as the next morning proved.

Quetzal's deck is a composite construction with Airex foam coring. The top layer of fiberglass is ½-inch thick; the Airex is about 1¼ inches; and the bottom layer of fiberglass is ¼ inch, making for a very stiff deck. A key attribute of Airex is that it resists water, and a close inspection and some heavy-footed stomping about the teakless deck revealed no obvious delamination. The next step was to fill all the screw holes using West System epoxy filler. Yard manager Don Reimers then suggested adding a layer of fiberglass to ensure a watertight deck. Don, who has also crossed the Atlantic aboard Quetzal, joked, "I don't want to be leaked on again on my next crossing."

While the yard crew worked on the deck, a new team of volunteers — Bob Pingel, Dan Stillwell and Earl Bennett — arrived to relieve Alan and Bruce, while Ron soldiered on for a second week. With the mast in a rare horizontal plane, we seized the opportunity to replace the standing rigging, add a new wind transducer and pull fresh wires through the spar. We also serviced the winches. In typical Quetzal fashion, a full-blown refit was sandwiched into the deck project.

When the new layer of fiberglass cured, the decks were primed with Awlgrip. It would have made sense to finish painting before reinstalling the deck fittings, but my tight schedule dictated otherwise. Every fitting would have to be taped before the final three coats of Awlgrip were applied. Another friend and Atlantic-crossing shipmate, Danny Peter, flew in to lend a hand. The two of us bed and remounted every piece of hardware, including new stanchions and mast rails, using a case of 3M 4200 and squeezing into tight corners below to wrestle a wrench onto wayward nuts.

Eighteen days after we started, I flew to France to captain a canal-boat trip, and returned a week later. I had four days before I was scheduled to set sail on a training passage to Nova Scotia.

To my surprise, Don had not only finished spraying the deck while I was away, he also sprayed the topsides. Quetzal looked stunning, at least 20 years younger. My sister and her son, Will, had cleaned the disaster below, vacuuming out bags of dust and grime. In short order, the mast was stepped, the rigging tuned, the cushions, cutlery, tools, books, charts and everything else was carried back aboard and hastily stowed.

I was still working when my new crew turned up, and after I introduced myself, they promptly went to work, schlepping provisions aboard. Thirty days after the project began, we pushed off the dock and headed north. It’s amazing what you can do with a lot of help from your friends.

The post Replacing Teak Decks is a Monumental Job appeared first on Cruising World.

I woke up this morning to a cloudy dreary day that looked like an ideal candidate for cleaning and lemon oiling Winterlude‘s interior teak. It’s a project I try to tackle twice a year — once when we return to the boat and once just before we leave. Otherwise 30 year old teak will become tired and worn. Unfortunately this year I’ve been lazy and didn’t do it in November when we returned and knew I had to get it done before we leave to cruise for three months — when there will be MUCH more fun things to do than play with teak.

We are so lucky — the interior of our boat is solid teak staving — i.e. individual teak 2″ slats with a groove to all fit together. Although we did not want ANY teak when we were boat shopping, the teak is homey, warm and inviting and we’ve grown to love it… well at least 363 days a year. So what’s up with the missing two days? That’s when I have to provide it the required TLC or it won’t stay looking pretty!

As I said I’ve been procrastinating this project for months. First I had get motivated to move everything that came into contact with the teak — books, hats, cameras, all the spices in the spice race – you’re starting to get the picture The boat is a wreck and I’m always astonished at how much CRAP we have “unstowed” everywhere! Every year I make a promise to myself to “clean up the mess” i.e. get rid of stuff just sitting around, not hidden, but every year when I do the teak I remember that I have not succeeded!

The second step is to wash all the walls and teak trim, drawers and louvered doors with Murphy Oil and water. I just squirt a bit of Murphy Oil cleaner in my little red bucket and fill it half full of water. Then I use a soft cotton rag to begin the process, starting in the front and working my way back to the companionway. I wipe down every bit of the teak – this portion of the project takes about 3 hours, without doing the quarterberth – that’s where I stuff all the stuff so that I can actually SEE the teak to clean it.

After letting it dry, I start back at the front of the boat with pure lemon oil. I use a Viva papertowel dipped in the lemon oil and proceed to wipe lemon oil over everything — generously. Despite the satin varnish, our teak will begin to soak up the lemon oil almost right away. After a half hour or hour, it begins to look quite splotchy, but I continue with getting a generous coat on all the teak and leave it alone. We’ll leave it alone for at least 24 hours. After 24 hours, I’ll take a rag and rub over to redistribute lemon oil, letting the splotchy areas that have already soaked it up have a bit more and getting rid of too much lemon oil on everything.

At this point, I start to put stuff away and regain my life. The entire project takes most of a day – by happy hour, I’m ready to celebrate it being done!

And the boat smells so good – if you like lemons!

The post From the Archives: Cleaning Interior Teak appeared first on Cruising World.