What more can a guy ask for?
It is absolutely amazing how much difference 4 hands makes over 2. When we first purchased Akupara, the Admiral found a scraper and immediately began trying to take off the grey sticky plastic crap that was all over the cockpit seats. It was more of an exploratory effort than a real one and up until now it was a little hard to look at.
Well, since we have now started stripping the decks, we attacked it with a heat gun, 2 scrapers, the admiral broke the first one, and a belt sander to clean it all up. There is still a bit of extremely hard adhesive left, but all of the grey crap is off and the majority of the glue. Sadly enough, once the belt sander made it through the glue and into the top layer of paint, you could start to see where the old original teak strips were. We definitely will not be putting teak back on, the closest would be some type of fake teak.
We are also seriously thinking about NOT putting the wood box back in on the starboard side of the cockpit. Once I removed it, I was amazed at the amount of extra space the starboard bench had. Our plans for now are to have some serious cockpit cushions made that will result in a luxurious starboard cockpit sofa, great for lounging and entertaining, maybe not so great offshore, but it is all about sacrifices. 😉
