Painting and keel fairing

Building a boat involves a lot of firsts, and today was the first time we applied paint to the boat. We're using bright white Easypoxy for just about everything that isn't varnished until we sort out a final color scheme - likely white and grey. The outsides will be rolled and tipped, but for the insides we're just brushing.

The sections under the fore and aft decks is fair game for paint at this point as is the area under the seats. These are going to be too hard to get to once the decks and floors are glued on so we're painting them in advance.

We could have just left it with an epoxy coating but it seems prudent to protect the wood as well as possible in case any water works its way into the bilge. The paint is such a bright white it's hard to look at in the sunlight and kind of hard to photograph too. It should be fine for the topsides but it's giving us second thoughts about using it for the deck.

Once the paint dried a bit we flipped the hull over and started fairing around the keel to prep for fiberglassing. All the gaps around the keel are filled with thickened epoxy as well as fairing around the skeg.

The stem is also faired but we stopped short of where the rigging will attach using a heavy duty u-bolt. We put a smaller fillet at the u-bolt location to make room for the backing plates and will blend it into the rest of the stem fairing later.

The last bit of fairing was to tie the stem into the ends of the sheer stringers. Once the epoxy dries we can sand the corner down to make a nice curve.

We also used the extra bits of epoxy to fill the screw, staple and stitching holes. With a bit of sanding the hull should have a nice smooth surface for the fiberglass to lay over. We left some air bubbles in the keel fiberglassing that needed filling so it would be nice to prevent that on the hulls if we can.