I may have lied.

So I thought that I was going to get away without drilling any more holes in the bottom of the boat.  I picked up my self-powered knot meter today, and have to drill another hole in the bottom of the boat to put the paddle wheel in.  The most unfortunate part is that the thru-hull is plastic.  I really do not want to use it, but to get a knot meter with a bronze thru-hull is prohibitively expensive.  I tried to find a bronze thru-hull to replace the plastic one, but the paddle wheel does not fit in the bronze thru-hulls. (Edit: My dad and I may have come up with another solution so no hole needs to be drilled.  More on that later.)

Glass Work

When I was working on the rear hatch, I did not end up mixing enough catalyst into the resin.  As a result, only the top of the hatch hardened.  My solution, which turned out to only be sort of a solution, was to wrap the vertical edge of the hatch with more glass and resin in hopes that it would make the resin under it kick.  It mostly did the trick, but where the hatch had been rounded on the edge, the resin was still sticky.  Again I covered it with more glass and resin, and finally the hatch was ready.

When I did the first test fit on the rear hatch, it did not quite fit.  I routed off a quarter inch from each of the short sides, and now the hatch fits like a glove.  The picture to the left is the hatch in place before I trim it to accept the hinge on the back side.  I will also be painting it so as to protect the hatch from the weather.








Today, because it was such a beautiful day out, I was able to glass the new support for the main hatch.  When I bought the boat, this was a mess.  The glass had been broken in a number of places, and because it was broken the cabin top had little support.  This meant that cabin top would flex a lot underfoot.  While the boat is in the water, most likely the main hatch would be open, and I would be standing on that, rather than the cabin top.  In any case, having the support back and glassed into place should make the cabin top stronger.  I also took the opportunity to drill the holes for the hatch slide.  This way I could fill them in with resin so that when they get redrilled for the screws, they will be sealed with resin.

Other Work

One of the things that I needed for the boat was a depth sounder (transducer).  Because the Maine coast is primarily rock rather than sand/silt/soft stuff, running aground here is a real crisis.  I grew up sailing on the Chesapeake Bay which is all silt/sand.  When you run aground there, which we did often because the boat drew 6'8" of water, you took a swim break, ate lunch, and then tried to get off the bottom.  This was because there was little risk of doing serious damage to the hull in a grounding in sand.  The Maine coast is mostly granite, so if you hit an underwater ledge, you better head for somewhere close to pull your boat immediately from the water because more than likely you have a hole in your boat or failure of the keel to hull joint.  Without a depth sounder, you have no idea how deep the water is, so have no clue as to when the bottom is coming up.  I want to be prepared for this, so I installed the gauge, and routed a channel in the wood paneling to hide/support the wiring.

Another way that I am trying to be prepared is by having a good bilge set up.  Even though I am reusing the bilge pump that came with the boat (tested and known to work), that is not good enough.  I also have the manual pump installed so I can pump the bilge from either in the cabin of from on deck.  To add to the safety of the system, I have added a high water alarm.  The float switch will kick on an alarm (100dB or so) when the water inside gets to a certain level.  This is an indication that there is a leak, and attention to the boat is needed.  It is also set so that it will go off well before the water reaches the floor boards in the cabin.  There is nothing like finding out your boat is taking on water like your floor boards floating.

This is the breaker panel with the new addition of the bilge alarm speaker.  I have yet to wire it up, but that is coming soon.

More Work, Same Post

While I was going to create another post for another day's work, I decided that why bother, when I had not even finished this post yet.

To the left is the rear lazarette hatch with the piano hinge in place.  I spent a lot of time playing with my dad's router to make some of these little projects come together.  Having access to a shop that has a lot of tools and someone with the knowledge to use them has been super beneficial to my boat project.  Plus my dad just enjoys working on boat projects anyway.

 I spent a fair amount of time researching insulation this winter, probably because it was such a long, cold, gross winter.  One of the many things that I discovered was that when doing solid insulation you should tape all of your seams to prevent airflow.  I used aluminum tape, but then ran out.  Since I was in a hurry, I finished with duct tape even though it is a poor choice.  I will go back an fix it eventually.

 I have to give credit where credit is due:  Thanks dad for crunching the numbers on this battery box and then cutting all the pieces.  It made is so I could work on other projects in the meantime.  This battery box is going to be fully glassed.  Once that is done, it will be able to hold four 6v T-105 golf cart batteries.  That leaves me a HUGE battery capacity, so I will probably start with only two 6v batteries, or maybe two 12v batteries.  I am a little up in the air about this.

The convertible chart table is almost done as well.  The table will have 2 drawers, and the whole thing will be supported on the fold out arms, as well as being bolted to the trim piece that it sits on.  There may also be a support block to hold the outboard corner.  We will see though.






I feel like I got so much accomplished this week while I was off of work.  I have been scrambling to get as much done as possible before the surveyor comes to look at the boat.  What I am really hoping is that he does not do his survey and tell me that the boat is a catastrophic failure.  It would be devastating, both to my moral but also to the dream of owning an ocean capable boat.  We shall see how I did buying the boat basically sight-unseen.