"son, your boat's just not that big"

I placed an order with Jamestown Distributors for five Beckson deck plates, 10" outer diameter and 7 5/8" inner diameter.  They will replace Spartina's five large deck plates, now yellowed by the sun and cracked by being stepped on a few too many times.  You can see three of the deck plates in the photo above from a mizzen and jib kind of day on the Elizabeth River.  A fourth one is to the left of the centerboard trunk, the fifth all the way aft next to the motor well.

Winter maintenance will focus mostly on the inside of the cockpit.  I plan to sand and repaint much of the interior, the steel gray Interlux topside paint now worm and scratched with white primer and epoxied wood showing in a few places.  

I will do routine touch up work on the varnished rub rails and main mast, and also the white deck paint and some green hull paint, but that should be easy enough.  With a wooden boat spring means painting somewhere. 

Sanding, scraping and prep work should be done by the first of the year, then I'll wait until warm weather in late February or early March to do the painting, which should not take much time.  (My ears still burn from 20-some years ago when I expressed surprise at how little paint and time it would take to repaint my earlier boat, a Devlin-designed Nancy's China.  Mary Hadley, who ran the Elizaberth City Shipyard where the original Spartina was docked, shook her head and said "Son, your boat's just not that big.....")

Still holding out hope for one more sail this year......