Our plans for this past weekend were changed after we experienced a major storm. We had planned on sailing down to Port Townsend for the wooden boat festival but a few days before we were set to leave we got pummelled with wave after wave of torrential rain, thunder, lightening, high winds and some hail thrown in there for good measure.
It was an amazing storm to see and even more so when you are in a boat, you feel closer to it, you feel every movement of the wind, hear every patter of rain on your deck and we could see the black storm clouds coming off in the horizon. Mark and I enjoyed it, watching from the cockpit, feeling the spray off of the water, the kids on the other hand were a bit scared by it all, not that I can blame them, the boat leaked like a sieve.
Rain just beating down.
Hail on the deck.
Soaked after a five second trip to the potty patch.
So after all this rain and the sheer amount of leaks we have in our boat we decided to skip the festival and spend the weekend trying to fix some of them. Of course best laid plans...
The weekend turned out to be some of the best weather of the year, we had days over 30 degrees Celcius and was too hot for fiberglassing, the resin would harden within seconds.
So we moved on to another project that was pressing, we have had a soft spot on the deck since we bought Sweets and it finally got replaced.
The hole started out this big but of course got bigger.
Thankfully it was not on the actual deck, it's a raised, curved part on the port side of the cockpit, it is hollow inside but we have no access to the area, after cutting it open we found some water and a plastic bag in there.
Vacuuming out the water. Unfortunetly we aren't sure how the water is getting in there which means our fix could be temporary unless we can stop it.
Bigger...
And bigger. We ended up having to cut out the whole top of the area.
Tracing the cutout onto bristal board.
Cutting out the shape onto wood.
We used very thin oak plywood to replace the wood, because the area curves we epoxied two layers of the wood into the area to fit the curve and fiberglassed over it, it's all sealed up tight now.
Some R & R after hard days work.
What happens when you watch a movie with your sister.
We were kind of disappointed that we missed the boat festival and we didn't actually end up getting any leaks fixed but the weekend wasn't a total loss, enjoyed probably the last of the amazing summer weather and finally got that soft spot fixed and the canvas man starts work on our custom cockpit enclosure this week, it's been our inside joke that when it rains we'll have to all hang out in the cockpit, it will be the driest place on the boat.
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