Glorious Sail - Not so great cabin
20 July 2017
Last night (July 19), I went for an after work sail. The winds seemed pretty brisk at the station, blowing at least 15 and I thought I might just be sitting in the cockpit at the dock.
But when I got to the marina, the winds seemed much more civilized, so out I went. It was Wednesday night, so the fleet was out; I could see them all over by the Cow and Calf. I headed away from them, more southerly. Winds were from the southwest, at about 12.
I decided to shake out the reef in the main and unroll the fully genny. Wow! I took off, never sailing slower than about 4.5 knots, and often hitting the high 5's. I sailed out past the Reef, then tacked back and forth towards the Cow. At first, I was a bit nervous with the heeling, but quickly became acclimated to standing on the opposite seat. I think I heeled at about 15 degrees at the most. By the end of the evening, I was searching for the puffs that would push me over a bit.
By 7 pm, I sailed back into the harbor, furled sail and headed back in.
So it was a great sail. But....a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the outer edge of the bottom of the port bulkhead was starting to curl a bit. Uh-oh. I wiped up the moisture on the bottom of the bulkhead and noticed it was getting punky.
And tonight as I was putting stuff away below, I noticed deformation on the outer lower corner of the bulkhead were it meets the compression post. I went to feel how bad the problem was getting, and it seems that there is about a 1 inch by 1 inch corner of the bulkhead has rotted away. Worse, the rot is starting to attack the bottom of the compression post.
My plan now: remove the rotten parts of the bulkhead and compression post. Unless I am badly mistaken, they are still sound, but I need to catch this early. I will then coat the new edges of the bulkhead and compression post with epoxy to hopefully stop more water infiltration.
I know the "right" course is to find and stop the leaks. I'm just not sure that is feasible. I've tried over the years, and I even had the yard come a couple of months ago and look at it to see if they could get the job done. The yard manager was honest and said that it would be cost prohibitive to have them do it; and together we looked at how difficult it would be for me to get at some of the fittings to rebed them(O'day clearly did not have ease of maintenance in mind when designing this boat).
So the plan (for now) is to at least stop things from getting worse.
Another project!
Sue is coming to visit this Saturday, and the plan is to go sailing if the weather cooperates. Wunderground says it will be overcast, but not likely to rain. The paper says mostly sunny and low 80's. We'll see.