Hi, all Aurora is nearing completion as we approach exhaustion. The eighth set of restoration photos is at http://homepage.mac.com/bear33/PhotoAlbum24.html In the last week, we continued to have problems with the deck paint. On the second from last coat, we covered the boat with a tarp too soon and "cross hatched" most of the high areas. On Wednesday evening after an hour of sanding off the cross hatch, we finished the final coat and left the boat uncovered overnight, only to find that the morning dew turned the shiny finish to caulk in the morning. Ugh. To recover, we had to change color to Matterhorn white (couldn't wait to special order what we had before), and did two more coats in the morning hours (my brother took two days off from work) so that the paint could dry all day before be covered with a tarp. It looks great now, but at $70 a quart, and one quart per coat, we definitely don't want to do any more. After the decks, it was almost a pleasure to do final hull repairs and prep, including the removal and filling in of both thru hulls (which were there for the marine toilet). We finished the painting of the deck, and cleaned and sealed the deck hull joint with 5200. We then used boards and ropes to secure the boat laterally so that we could lower all four trailer pads at once to paint the bottom. Pretty much all the weight of the boat is on the bulb of the keel, and the four support boards did a fine job of holding the boat as we painted the bottom, although we won't go aboard again until the boat is back on the pads. We chose VC Tar2 for our barrier coats. It's glossy black and went on well. We needed two hours between overcoats, but we still managed to apply six coats in one day, starting at nine a.m. and finishing after nine p.m. The six coats took four quarts, and doing all the coats in one day allowed us to use part of a quart for one coat and then the rest on the next (four hour pot life). Between coats, we also "color matched" the topsides with repair resin and started to fill in scratches. The boat spent the last eight years sitting on barrels, so there are more than a few topsides imperfections. Still, we'd rather sand, clean and wax the topsides than paint them, so... Today we'll apply two coats of VC-17m anti-fouling paint (amazing how fast it dries), and tomorrow we hope to put the boat back down on the trailer pads and get started on re-installed deck hardware. We ordered a new Mercury 4 HP 4 Stroke outboard for it yesterday, but it won't likely make it for a launch next Friday, so our new launch date is Friday, September 16th. Jim