I love fillets.
Houseboat update, Sunday, October 7, 2019 – I love fillets. I hate fillets. It occurs to me it may be time for a small discourse on the difference between filleting and filleting. I don’t mind filleting, although I am not especially skilled at it. Filleting, on the other hand is an almost intolerable chore to me, although I have gotten to be passably good at making effective if not altogether decent-looking fillets. “He must be sniffing solvents again,” I hear you say. That may or may not be true, but not particularly useful to the discussion. If I want to toss a slab of salmon on the grill, I’ll get out the knife and fil-LAY it first. But if I want to reinforce a 90-degree joint between two pieces of wood that have been screwed and glued together in perpendicular orientation, I’ll mix up a batch of epoxy thickened with wood dust and run a bead of the stuff along the corner and shape it into a coved FILL-et, using the end of a wooden tongue depressor. Jersey Girl is loaded with such joints, and if I want to be reasonably confident that she’ll stay in one piece under the flexing forces of currents and swells in the water, I must be diligent in making sure every one of them is well filleted. This is time-consuming, frustrating, mind-numbing, boring, arduous work, often requiring me to bend into shapes no 76-year-old body was ever intended to do. Did I say I do not like filleting? I like it even less than sanding, and that’s not at all.
