Feet of clay, covered in gelcoat

A perfect day, warmer than it should be, and the boats were festooned with the detritus of the happy sun-soaked tasks their inhabitants got up to.

Voyager got an airing. Almost all the textiles were on deck, their moldiest sides exposed to the sun. I scraped the flaking paint off the hatch (with dilatory persistence), and decided I shouldn't scrape so hard because I was getting fiberglass splinters on the soft undersides of my arms.

Russell came by several times. The third time, he looked at me funny, and said, "You don't need to do that."

I stopped and looked back.

"That's gelcoat," he explained, which was no explanation to me.

"See," he went on, "when they pop the boat out of the mold, they spray it all over with a mix of polyester resin and fiberglass. That's gelcoat."

I lowered my scraper. I looked at him. I looked at the nearly-denuded end of the hatch, the result of my afternoon's work. I looked at the cat, snoozing well within range. I looked at my galley (kitchen, to you landlubbers), covered in polyester-resin-and-fiberglass dust. I looked back out at him. "Okay," I said.

He laughed. "You can call me all those names, if you want to!" Hell, it only took him 4 hours to get around to telling me. Maybe I should have.