To all boat owners everywhere. If you have a deck leak, please take the time to address the situation properly to prevent unnecessary damage!
Akupara was built in 1976. That makes her 39 years old. We expect to find issues considering her age and that there have been several previous owners, which is why we are doing a complete rebuild which includes completely gutting the entire interior, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical. Had we just launched her as is, we would never have been aware of some of the more serious issues that we are slowly discovering. We knew we had a large foredeck repair coming and since then have discovered that the anchor locker bulkhead will need to be completely replaced, and yesterday as August disassembled the aft cabin, I had my first really good look at the mizzen main chainplates. The chainplates themselves have been replaced which is great, but they will need to be removed, and I will need to perform some surgery on the aft head bulkhead and aft dressing table bulkhead. It seems that whoever did the replacement, removed the old chainplates and discovered some wet plywood in the bulkheads. Rather than completely cut out the wet wood, and glass in a proper repair, they simply used a hole saw and drilled a bunch of holes enough to chisel out the immediate area of the chainplate, used some kind of a block of plastic and reattached the chainplate. I was stabbing it with a screwdriver to try to identify how big of an area will need to be fixed. Prior to that, it actually did not look that bad.
Thankfully, the actual knee that the chainplate is bolted to, which is on the other side of the bulkhead, seems to be solid and dry so the repair will be limited to replacing a portion of the bulkhead only. As well, the repair will be hidden inside the upper lockers in the aft cabin as since it is a rather tight area to get to, the repair may not turn out as visually pleasing as I would normally like. This does allow for a more robust repair though, which is good.
So, we have some more grinding and glassing to do but when we are finished, it will be as solid as it was originally. Did I mention that we will be using all marine grade plywood for repairs? Household plywood has absolutely no place on a boat.
Oh and there is also a very good look at some of the condition of the deck fitting bolts. You can actually see water dripping from one bolt. These are for one of the stanchions which we have not removed as of yet.
For those of you who have been following along, you may be wondering why we seemed to switch to dismantling the interior. We decided that we needed to gut the interior as soon as possible to allow Akupara to thoroughly dry out inside. All of the “pegboard” that lines the hull inside the lockers is simply trapping moisture, and hiding cockroaches 😉 and needs to be removed asap and given a chance to dry as well as quite a few pieces of wood.