How to Install a Thru Hull. What Not To Do.

We have been busy as beavers this week getting boat projects done, my main contributions were hoisting Mark and his tools bags up and down the mast, but most of the projects I can't actually do myself so I hang around and be a helper where I can. One thing I did do was make a wooden cockpit  grate. I was sick of stepping on the puddle of water that always accumulates in the side of the cockpit where the shower head is, so instead if wiping it up three times a day with a towel and creating more laundry, this seemed to be a better solution.

Turned out pretty good. We are too poor to afford teak and it would need to be special ordered anyway so oak it is. Cut to size, each piece individually varnished with six coats and nailed together, works like a charm.

However, this post is not about my lovely grate, but about the thru hull Mark installed while I was away last week. Here is a picture of it above, you can see the thru hull and above it a black circle, Mark didn't tell me about this and I had to discover it myself, but I won't do that to you, Mark cut the first hole for the thru hull at the wrong angle and couldn't get it to fit so he had to make another one and patch the first one.

Here he is patching.

And epoxying. 

So how could we have avoided putting an unnecessary hole in the hull of our boat?

1. Do not attempt the kind of project while your wife is out of town and you have no one to help.

2. Don't paint your dinghy the day before installing a thru hull so that you can't access the outside from the water.

3. Make sure you know where you are drilling. Check twice, drill once.

Here are so e picture Mark took of his attempts. This is the first hole drilled with a. Rope coming through it. A thru hull consists of two pieces, an inside piece and an outside piece, the hull gets sandwiched in between, how do you get the two pieces together when you have no one to help you?

The outside piece string on the rope, the rope out through the hole...

...and attached to a boat hook on deck. Pretty smart actually, he slid the outside piece of the thru hull down the rope and right onto the hole, if only the first hole had been drilled correctly this project would have been a home run, or hole in one?

Regardless of how it got there, Mark eventually got the thru hull in the head installed and I now have the sink draining overboard, would I have preferred not having an extra hole drilled in the bottom of my boat? Of course. Would I have liked to have been informed about said hole instead of stumbling on it myself? Yes. And considering the grief I have him over it, I'd say Mark is wishing that too.