Labor Day Weekend Aboard Spirit of South Carolina; Volunteers Share their Saturday to get her ready.

 Labor Day Weekend; a traditional opportunity to enjoy one last summer long weekend doing,, anything but labor.  Not for this bunch.

New and old Volunteers stretch the social distancing
 rules for a short moment for a group photo on board
Spirit of South Carolina.

Saturday morning,  eleven Spirit of South Carolina Volunteers boarded the Schooner and collectively gave over 45 hours in labor from their weekend, laying into maintenance projects aimed at getting her ready to sail.  With Mother Nature granting some reprieve of scorching temperatures, and holding off the regularly scheduled squall, old and new volunteers pitched in together, picking up brushes and varnish, scattering over far corners of the deck to add additional coats of Deks Olje D2 varnish to her cap rail. 

Danny's New and Improved
Gangway Steps

Danny Johnson and his newly recruited volunteer, Nathan Robinson teamed up to prep the raw wood surfaces of Danny's newly constructed gangway steps. 

Kalev Kruuk, brought along his son, Riivo,  and took charge of one end of the port side aft cap rail scarf eventually meeting Old Salt, Steve Boone in the middle. Philippe Agafonovus took on another scarf section.  Madison Pulley, all the way from Greenville, took over the portside bow cap rail scarf. Newcomer, Peter Kohn laid a second coat onto the taffrail. Layne Carver and Joe Gorman organized the materials and kept the coffee and water coming.

Organizing the materiel 
for the varnishing project

Saturday's work on the cap rail scarves contributed to a lengthy two-phased project of first scraping/sanding down each of the 17 sapele wood scarves (sections) of the cap rail, clean them up, then coat them, first with up to 8 coats of a D1 preservative/sealant, then follow with a 12 coat application of varnish, about 85 labor hours of effort spread out to account for drying time, and weather interference from pesky squalls.

Volunteer Coordinator, Bryan Oliver  explaining
 the latest draft of the Crew Manual,
(available for download on this Blog)

By 11 AM, 7 cap rail scarves (sections) had received a coat of varnish and were left to set up.  Bryan Oliver took the five New Volunteers on an orientation tour of the schooner while Joe Gorman coached or refreshed others in their line-handling/knots  on the Deckhand Skills checklist. By 2 Pm, the threatened rain squalls had still not yet appeared, but Volunteers' work was done here, and so we all disembarked for a well-deserved Labor Day weekend.