So close, yet...

Leonard Cohen - "Leaving Greensleeves," the last track off his 1974 album New Skin For An Old Ceremony.

I sanded the hotcoat today, it went OK. As you can see above, some of it did not go OK. The deck and bottom were both fine, even the problem areas from before just flattened right out look fine unless you look closely and notice the different shade on the foam beneath.

But I did run into problems on the deck half of the rails. It seems the gloss got too thin on the rails because it took so long for it to gel, and as I was hand sanding the rails it went through to the paint. It only took one pass with 320 grit to do this, which means they must have been very, very thin.

This is the port-stern corner of the diamond, the only spot I noticed being a problem prior to sanding and the one which was definitely the worst. The paint poked through in a number of places, a lot of them small but enough to warrant redoing the whole rail. So that's what I decided to do.

First I roughed up the whole edge of the board, and about an inch up onto the deck. I then brushed gloss on, trying to simulate how you would do a gloss coat for the whole board, running the board lengthwise and crosswise, and I tried to fan it up onto the deck so it will (hopefully) blend when I sand it. Right as it gelled (which this gloss did in almost perfect time, a little long but nothing like the original) I pulled the tape on the underneath so it would hopefully run a little bit, so as to smooth out the hard edge left usually left by tape and hopefully make it blend better. I've found that making boards, for me and these first few anyway, is good practice for ding repair because I frequently find myself trying to make some mess-up look like it should.

Neutral Milk Hotel - "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea," the third track from the album of the same name. I love this album, and have probably listened to it about a thousand times, literally. But I hadn't listened to it in a while, at least a month and a half, and like always it blew me away. I thought about putting the whole album up here, but refrained. I don't know why I chose this song, maybe because I covered it as SotRM one time. But maybe I'll put more on sometime. OK, I think I will right now.

Neutral Milk Hotel - "Ghost," track number nine off In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I love the drums in this song.