Tom moved GHOST to his back yard and has begun the difficult job of repairing the waterlogged balsa soaked in her deck. In some cases, this is the only way to repair the deck if it has gotten to the point of being overly spongy. If cought soon enough, you can hollow out the balsa core around the fittings, pour in epoxy resin and allow to cure. Then drill through the resin section where the resin is a nice solid structure. Tom wanted to return GHOST  to her original condition and share his work for all of us to reference should we also need to.  Here is the repair:

Ghost is in my back yard.  Weather has been poor, so work so far has been slow and piecemeal.  The mast is off the boat now and I have stripped it of hardware.  The original paint on the mast is virtually gone and a lot of red primer is showing.  The mast will be prepared and painted this spring with two-part polyurethane.  I noted that the spreader tips are badly  corroded.  Will need to replace.

This weekend I will be removing lifelines, stanchions, and begin removing deck hardware.  This is all in preparation for deck repairs.  Sometime soon I will start sending progress  photos to document repairs.  

I have been used to a full racing schedule the past 15 years on Ghost and have an itch to go  racing.  I will be crew this year on a Beneteau First 38 named Bananas.  This is a great offshore   boat.  I need a little of this to keep my sanity, but I need to reserve time to keep Ghost moving along.  I expect 9-12 months working on Ghost.

I am in the thick of major deck repairs around the mast step and foredeck.  I found wet balsa  there and have removed outer skin, replaced five small areas of balsa and have dried the deck out completely.  Will be reglassing the deck in a week.  I have taken some photos of the various stages  of the deck repair, which I will send on to you shortly.

Ghost is a handful of work for me right now.  I expect it will be early next year before I am done.   I'll keep a record of changes, improvements, helpful hints, etc. so you can use and put on the website.