Courage built the original cockpit well. In Panama we weren't using it really, so they decided to Ron in a new design and see if we liked it. They couldn't find marine plywood, so just used regular plywood to try out different layouts. We didn’t want to use the $130/ gallon marine paint on something we were going to tear out, so we didn’t seal it. It was temporary. Turned out we liked it, but we were in French Polynesia, everything was expensive there. In Tonga, we could afford the labor to help Courage do the work. But materials are all imported with significant duties. So when I went to the states in December, I built a shipping crate with marine plywood, filled it with epoxy, fiberglass, paint, 1x4's, 2x4's, clothes for the kids, batteries, solar panels, new glass windshield, and all kinds of treasures (including brownie mix)!! Now we are able to rebuild our temporary (which lasted just over a year) cockpit the way we like it and will get good use out of it. The wood that was not wet did not rot, it looks nice and we're donating it to a local man, Teki. He took our old batteries too. We got 5 lobsters out of the deal! It's the corners that had standing water at times that were the areas of rot. Unfortunately, my dinner seat was very near one of those corners! So I guess you could call it an experiment gone well, so we are building it for real!
Shannon
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