Low down.

The damn floor grate broke apart again. Which means I allowed myself to give up on it and called a shipwright to get a quote for the floor grate of my dreams. I sent him some pictures and dimensions and even met him on the boat to get a better idea of what it would take to reimagine the cockpit floor. Well, his quote was the stuff of nightmares, so Mack decided to take another stab at fixing the floor. 

This time we weren't messing with glue or epoxy. Mack discovered 5200, an adhesive caulk made by 3M that's about $12 a tube and recognized as dangerously indestructible. He took extra time to pluck or sand out old adhesive before reconstructing the floor and sealing it together. He bought new dowels and replaced the missing ones. For about 3 weeks, he tinkered around in the garage, trying not to go crazy from the annoyance of detail work. 

Once he got it all rebuilt and secured, we made the rogue decision to apply a thin layer of varnish. Varnish on the floor is tricky because you don't want things in the cockpit to be slippery, but we decided a thin layer wouldn't take away too much grip and would do wonders for the look of the wood. 

​We were right.