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This weekend we finished the big bedliner project.

Or at least one of the big bedliner projects

We had a problem with our anchor locker. Since we’re planning on going to some pretty remote places, we figure it’s a good idea to have as much chain on our rode as we can handle. With the Muffin’s extremely fine entry, it’s hard to store a full chain rode up there, so we’re planning on going with around 120 feet of chain, enough to anchor at 7:1 rode in anything under 15-20 feet of water, with an additional 120-160 feet of Brait rode attached to it. The problem, as it is so often with the steel hull, is that if we have 120 feet of 5/16″ chain rattling around in there, the hull is going to get bashed up. We thought of lining the anchor locker with Dri-Dek grating, but we’d lose a lot of volume in there – and we need all the room we can get!

It was Neil of s/v Zora who came up with the idea of using pickup truck bedliner to line the anchor locker – brilliant idea – so we went to the local VIP Autoparts and got a quart of the stuff.

After scraping a bunch of rusty spots and going at them with RustBullet, I opened up the can of Herculiner. NASTY! It’s roughly the consistency of warm organic crunchy peanut butter, and it SMELLS! I mean, we use a lot of rather nasty chemicals on the boat, but this stuff is off the charts.

Luckily we had a charcoal filter respirator on hand, so I donned that, and put on a first coat. It seemed to go on very poorly – you could still see the Rust Bullet through it; it didn’t look a think like the fancy bedliners in the backs of the giant Dodge Ram pickups that seem to be everywhere in Portland these days. The can said that the second coat could be applied after 1 1/2 – 2 hours, when the stuff was no longer tacky, so I waited. And waited. I’m sure Frankie was REALLY happy that I was sitting in the cockpit, drinking beer, watching paint dry while she chipped rust in the lazarette!

I finally drove her home to kill some time, and went back to put the second coat on – and it went on THICK. Really thick and nasty – and now it has dried, and it feels pretty darn close to indestructible. We’ll see how it works out, but for now, I’m impressed!