Finally, the list is getting shorter

Today was a day to scratch three more things off the list, two relatively minor and one that will require several weeks to complete.

First, we noticed that one of the passive ventilation grills on the starboard side was broken. (This boats takes in fresh air on the starboard side and exhausts it on the port side.)  Since the PO left us with two brand new vents, we removed the broken vent today and replaced it with a new one. Sounds easy but it wasn't. Behind the vent intake is a plastic manifold that holds two vent hoses that go to the bilge and engine space. I won't bother describing how this arrangement is held together or what happens when you remove one of the exterior vents. Needless to say, what looked like it would take 15 minutes took more than an hour spent standing on the top of a ladder. OK, now we have a new vent in place and our leg muscles got a workout.

Then we tackled the soft spot on the rear deck. Because the upper fiberglass skin of the deck had been breached, we couldn't let this go and it's about time we did a real fiberglass repair, since we now own a fiberglass boat!

The deck construction from the top down is Gelcoat, fiberglass cloth, then about 3/4-inch of balsa core and then the cockpit liner at the bottom, which is is all fiberglass with no coring. (The balsa, incidentally, is the same soft wood that you may have built model airplanes from when you were a kid. (Forget this handy reference if you are less than 50 years old.)

Balsa was widely used to build up the thickness of decks and sometimes entire hulls, although it has been replaced now with newer materials that do the same thing without balsa wood's drawbacks. The balsa coring can best be understood if you look at the edge of an ordinary corrugated box. The material between the outer and inner surfaces serves the same purpose as the balsa coring between two layers of fiberglass. Because it is the end grain of the core that bears the stress, it is quite strong.  Unfortunately, it also absorbs water and silently rots when it does.

In this case, the PO had installed rod holders - six of them - around the edge of the cockpit deck. All that took was a hole saw and very little thought.  The problem is, once that hole was cut and the rod holder installed, the balsa core was exposed to water that seeped under the edge of the road holder mounting plate. Sure, that took years but it is very predictable. 

What the PO should have done was cut the hole in the deck and then seal the insides of the hole with resin.  But he didn't.

We removed the offending rod holder and then used a small saw to cut out the soft spot on the deck.  The crap you see at the top is the wet balsa.  The hole is where the rod holder was.

The damage to the fiberglass deck took place when the wet balsa froze and expanded, pushing up through the deck. I kept cutting until I ran into undamaged balsa core.

The repair to a small area like this is fairly easy but the damaged area needs to dry completely first, as it will now that it is open  Is there other damage around the other rod holders? Probably, but it it isn't as severe and can wait another year before we get to it.

Bernie, our fiberglass guy, checked out the deck all the way around the boat and could only find problems around the rod holders.

The last thing for today was to install a fresh water faucet in the cockpit. Frances has wanted one for years and now, she'll finally have it. Drilling and running 1/2-inch water hose took better than an hour.  The faucet taps into the water line after the accumulator and check valve, so she'll be able to use it when we are at the dock plugged into city water or while we are underway.