Phyllis

I’m going to make a confession here: I think brightwork is beautiful. However, since I’m the one that ends up maintaining it—that’s because John insists I’m so much better at it than he is, which is a rotten trick and one I fall for regularly—I also believe it doesn’t belong on our boat.

During this last refit, we had custom wood bezels with embedded helicoils built to fit permanently around the cabin ports (we’ll discuss these further in our Refit Series). During cold weather, we screw Plexiglas covers to the bezels and voila…no condensation! However, after installing them we realized that the little chains with small bars at the end that hold the ports open were now too short. (Have you noticed that every time you make a change on the boat, something else doesn’t work and you have to fix that, etc.?)

I am writing this while looking out the window of our rental house in Maine, admiring another gorgeous sunset over the beautiful waters of Penobscot Bay. There is about two inches of snow on the ground and on as much of the rocks as stick up above the water at high tide. The window I am sitting next to is only about six feet from the high tide mark; we are as close to living on the water as we can get without being on the boat!