Morning all, I hope everyone is having an excellent Christmas 🙂 annoyingly I’ve decided to have been struck down with some kind of Peruvian murder flu (just bit of a cold apparently). Anyway I’ve been spending a lot of time planning for the next stages, trying to avoid the naivety of some of the previous stages so I hopefully won’t hit any snags until the structural interior is done. I’ve been searching far and wide for examples of what I want to do and stumbled across an Arden Gypsy for sale, this predates Merganser by a few years but uses exactly the same hull mould and turns out that the forward refit I had planned is pretty much the same in the Gypsy, which means removing the compression post is not only feasible, it’s been done by the manufacturer. This means that copying the design with modern materials will give me the peace of mind about not having the rig fall through the roof that’s been holding me back from making that decision. I’m also absolutely loving the teak deck of this particular boat so I am almost certainly going to do this to Merganser (with a more sustainable wood) it’s probably less cost and work than getting a perfect finish on the deck with paint given the damage I’ve done grinding all the old goopy paint off. Have a great new year everyone and hopefully we’ll be back to regular progress soon