The Leak That Launched a Thousand Jobs

June 6, 2013
St. Peter's Canal, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

You see we had a little drip in one of our cabinets, in a cabinet that we’d like to have as a dry place.  Drip, drip, drip.  Leaks can be amazingly difficult to track down on a boat.  A drop of water gets inside and weaves its way ever downward usually through the most circuitous route imaginable all in an effort to make finding the origin point challenging.  Such was the case with this leak.  We’d think we found the source and bed it with silicone. Next rain, it’d reappear.  After eliminating all other possibilities, the only one remaining was the toerail. 

Andante’s toerail is a beautiful piece of teak that sits on top of the gunwale (that’s basically the top, outermost edge of the boat).  It’s original to the boat and after over 30 years of sanding and general abuse, the screws that hold it together had been exposed.  It was in rough shape. 

What the heck!  It’s fall we’ve got plenty of time to do this job, tackle the few items on our “to do” list and get the boat ready for our May 1 departure date.  First was figuring out how to do the job then removing all the hardware on the old toerail, pry them up, mould the new toerail which is actually 2 pieces of teak screwed together and then attach it to the boat with 5200 and screws.  Nerves stretched tight as we forced the teak to bend to Andante’s shape and used about 50, 3-way furniture clamps to hold it on. 

As long as we had some deck hardware off why not paint the hull?  Andante’s last paint job was 22 years ago just before we bought her.  The clear topcoat applied failed about 10 years ago and we’d been buffing it off in places to the point that up close she looked like a bad skin disease was taking over.  No shiny reflections of the water’s surface here.

A local company, Diversified Marine, agreed to let us do all the prep work and they’d do the actual application in their heated shed. Dan & Mike coached us along as we discovered all of the muscles and tendons of the human arm!  Four weeks of sanding through layers of paint, repairing imperfections inherent in a 35 year old boat and we were ready for the primer coat.  Sand some more and the first of 3 coats of Awlcraft was applied.  Our new color Jade Mist Green.  Our reaction - WOW!

While we were hauled out other projects were handled.  One area of concern was our bobstay.  This is a rod that holds up the bowsprit.  The bobstay goes from the bottom of the bowsprit and attaches to the hull and a wire stay goes from the top and attaches to the top of the mast.  Our worry was if something happened to that top stay the bobstay might not be strong enough to hold up the bowsprit on its own. An outside expert assured us it was plenty strong. 

Back in the water I was attaching that top stay to the outermost part of the bobstay and couldn’t quite get it so Russ stepped out to help.  I’m not sure if there was any sound as the bobstay simply collapsed but our splash into the December chilled water was memorable!  And we had the answer to the question of the bobstay’s strength. That bent piece is the old bobstay. It's supposed to be straight!

Russ did a lot of thinking and figuring and came up a hollow stainless tube.  It’s not as elegant as the original but it is strong!

This brought up the whole question of our standing rigging.  The standing rigging is all of the wire that holds up the mast and we’d been toying with upsizing from ¼” to 9/32.  Again, we’ve got all this hardware off, why not?

The other big conundrum was our anchoring system.  The original arrangement worked great when we were cruising in more benign areas with a combination of chain and rope. But where we’ve been cruising lately, and want to continue to cruise, we wanted all chain.  The trick is that all chain didn’t feed smoothly down into the lowest chain locker.  Someone had to go down, crawl under the bunk and pull it down.  Again not a big deal in most circumstances but if you’re trying to get out of an anchorage that’s suddenly become untenable like say the wind has piped up out of nowhere to 40 knots blowing you on shore, you need one person cranking the anchor and one person at the helm. 

So the idea was to move the anchor windlass back and put a tube through our bunk so the feed to the chain locker would be more vertical.  And we’d need to add in a bulkhead to support the weight of the windlass on deck.  I gotta say I wasn’t too keen on having a pole through our bunk but Russ convinced me that I’d be more likely to get a good night’s sleep if I though we were safely anchored and could get out of said anchorage in a hurry if we had to.  And yes we’ve heard lots of pole dancing jokes!

Again, lots of think time figuring out how to do this and then the actual doing of it.  It’s turned out well and the pole’s not so bad.

Throw in lots of other jobs that came up, some visiting with family and a wonderful last minute visit from my parents and sister (who instead of waving us off got put to work!)   OK 23 days but who’s counting!

and we a few weeks later than planned.

And we’ve proven the Boating Rule of 3’s ~ Every job will take three times as long and lead to three other jobs!

The reason we're trying to leave earlier is we hope to get further down the Labrador than we did in 2011.  We've made an offshore jump from Cape May to Halifax in 6 days and have just locked into the Bras D'or Lakes on Cape Breton. Next stop Port Aux Basques.