Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo.  I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion.  I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid.  After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)

So for my birthday I got a new toy for my bike. Its a Garmin GPS designed for cycling and it has a Heartrate monitor as well as cadence and wheel speed sensors. When combined with some cool software such as Ascent or a web service called MotionBased, it really shows you all the details of your ride. With Ascent I can replay my ride with a heads up display showing me all sensor data that had been recorded on my ride at any speed interval as my course is overlayed on various types of maps, similar to Google Earth. I then take my data and upload it to a service called MotionBased, which is a web service for sharing workout information.
This shows a little overview of Ascent

Here is a still image showing my ride, and in the app this is actually animated with speed and location controls.

Here I can compare my heart rate in red, to my speed in green and my altitude, all this at the same time as i’m viwing my map animation.

Here is a link to my profile on MotionBased which shows similar information, but in a web format.

http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/2805054

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

Today on my way to school I missed the early train and had to wait a whole 15 minutes for the next one. I knew I was late getting there so I ran from the car when I saw two trains at the station, but half way there I saw my 8:04 train pulling away.  The 8:19 train is much busier and as we stopped at Campbell station and the number of people on the train doubled, the train operator yelled out “lets get this party started”.  I take the 8:04 train usually because that gives me enough time to miss a train, like I did today, and not be late for class.