Refit

Those little holes in the bottom of our boat

Those little holes in the bottom of our boat

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The excitement and stress involved in doing a large project on a boat is always high. The anticipation of being complete is a great feeling. Knowing that all you have to do is that one last thing and you are finally done…except…we are learning that it is never really done.
Just as we were wrapping up the large undertaking of pulling down our mast and replacing all of the standing rigging holding it up, we decided to do another ritual check of things around the boat.
This check is fairly simple and often quick. The first thing we look at is the bottom center of our bilge. Since this is the absolute lowest point in the boat, and under all of the floor boards, it is where all water flows if there is any kind of leak. Checking this area for water will give us some insight into how well we are doing at not sinking.
After checking the bilge at the lowest point, we go through each of our thru-hulls. These are the holes in our boat that are meant to be there. Some are above the water line outside and some are below. Some are used to discharge water out, like the sink drains, and some are for bringing water in, like the air conditioner cooling water.
Each thru-hull is first a hole cut into the boat. A bronze or plastic device is placed into the hole and sealed in place. Attached to this bronze or plastic device is a valve often referred to as a sea-cock. The sea-cock typically has a barbed nipple attached to connect a hose. The intention behind all of this is to control how the water comes in or goes out and to avoid leaking.
As with all things boat related, just as we thought we were getting done with big projects like the rigging, our inspection of thru-hulls revealed that one of them was leaking. That meant our boat was sinking! Of course, our boat was sinking very, very slowly but still.
Unfortunately, the only right way to fix a leaking thru-hull is to pick the whole boat up out of the water, remove, and re-bed it. As always, we started researching the best ways to do this project and came to MarineHowTo.com. This site has a wealth of experience based tutorials on boat related work. It is well worth a look if you are learning.
They describe a method of using fiberglass backing plates instead of the wooden ones that Hunter thought was a great *read cheap* idea. These are to be glassed into the boat so they are permanent and fixed. It also suggests that using something like the Groco flange adapter will help to improve the strength of the whole system. We decided this was the way to go and we were going to do the oldest 5 thru-hulls below the waterline. We have 11 total below the waterline but the other 6 had been re-bedded a few years ago by a previous owner.
We needed to flatten the inside of the boat so that our new backing plates fit properly and then could be well glassed into the bottom of our boat. When you need to grind the inside of your fiberglass boat and you don’t really want to get fiberglass dust everywhere what do you do? I say make a sanding tent!
After a ton of research, even more elbow grease, and a little bit of guess work, we were able to get them all replaced. Of course just we we thought we had the hard job completed we realized that the hull had some bumps on it…These bumps are known as osmotic blisters.
These are bubbles that form between the fiberglass of the hull and the gelcoat that is used as a barrier. It turns out that gelcoat isn’t really that great for boats despite being on just about every fiberglass boat I have ever been on.
The blisters fill with fluid which slowly converts to a corrosive substance. It then eats away at the fiberglass which rots it. The only solution is to grind all of the bad glass out of the hull. It was a little scary to start grinding on the outside of our hull but once we got started we just kept going until we got all of the water out.
After grinding it all out the next step was to fill the holes with thickened epoxy. We used West Systems 105 Resin, 205 Fast Hardener, and enough 406 Colloidal Silica to make it like a thick peanut butter. This mixture had to be pushed into the holes then smoothed out to make a nice finish. Once we had the finish shape we wanted we were able to paint over the patches to make a finished look.
That big hole in the top of our boat…

That big hole in the top of our boat…

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I didn’t realize just how many holes there are in a large boat. Despite not wanting to have holes, since they seem to be how water gets in, there are several. One of the larger ones on the topside of the boat is for the mast.
Some boats have a deck stepped mast and some have a keel stepped mast. A keel stepped mast is one where the mast goes through the top deck of the boat and then rests on top of the keel at the bottom of the boat. A deck stepped sits on a foot on the deck. Under the foot on the inside of the boat is a compression post that goes down to the bottom of the boat.
On Rána we have a deck stepped mast with a solid stainless steel compression post. This has the advantage of having a much smaller hole in our deck than if we had a keel stepped but that doesnt mean we have no hole.
When we took the mast off the boat it seemed like the right time to take apart the mast step and work on rebedding it. This is where we completely disassemble it, remove it from the boat, clean it, then remount it with new bedding compound in the hopes that it will not leak on our heads.
Upon taking apart our mast step we found that ours had a mast foot, which is the dark grey plate, a stainless steel plate with wings to hold the turning blocks, and another stainless steel plate which was welded to the compression post.
Someone got the wild idea that we could try rebedding just the mast foot and leave the rest in place since it looked as if the whole compression post would have to be removed to rebed all of it. As I am sure you can imagine that did not go well.
A few days after we bedded the mast foot we were sitting at our table as it started to rain outside. It didn’t take long before it was raining inside as well. I suppose it was better than having it leak after the mast went back up! So we went to work taking it all apart again and cleaning it up. This time we took the whole compression post out and cleaned everything.
Once we got it all back in place it looked pretty good. We waited a few days for the bedding compound to cure then we did some wet tests to make sure it wasn’t going to leak. The only thing left to do now was to take apart and rebed all of the chain plates…
All things aloft…

All things aloft…

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When we surveyed Rána we found out that she would need new standing rigging sooner rather than later. After doing some further digging we realized she was still on her original rigging which meant it was 17 years old.

We had to learn a lot about standing rigging and how it all worked. The standing rigging is the wire and other components that hold the mast up. Our boat is a Bergström-Ridder or more commonly known as a B&R rig. This is a unique design that was adopted by Hunter several years ago. It was originally viewed as a poor choice but lately has gained a lot of regard since it appears to work as well as they said it would without much issue. It is now being incorporated into other manufactures designs in some fashion or another.

 

Standard Fractional Rig

The B&R rig is a lot like any other rig however it lacks a backstay. For reference, you can see in the picture that the stand style of rig has a forestay coming from the front of the mast to the bow of the boat, a backstay coming from the back of the mast to the stern of the boat, and two side stays that go from either side of the top of the mast down to the chain plates on the sides of the boat. The B&R rig does away with the backstay by making a tripod out of the forestay and side stays. The side stays are held back at an angle by the spreaders. This keeps all three stays at 120 degrees from each other.

B&R Rig

Since the rig is setup this way it is very stable and does not require any adjustment while sailing. It is sort of a “set it and forget it” design only requiring the occasional inspection for problems. This has its ups and downs but for us we felt like it would be best to have the simplest setup we can.

We did some research into rigging age and realized that as a general rule, rigging should only be used for around 10 years and that is when it’s been used in the best conditions. We spoke to a lot of different sailors and it seems there is a lot of opinions about this. We heard everything from “20 years is fine” to “5 years is the very end.”

After doing even more research we decided that the only real answer was to scale the mast and fully inspect everything. Various websites give ideas on how to inspect your rigging but none seemed to really lay it all out there. In the end the most important thing we found to look for is cracking from corrosion or stress as well as rust staining. The rust staining is an indicator of a large problem since all of the standing rigging is made of 316 Stainless Steel. It takes a lot to make this stuff rust but the salty harsh ocean environment is just the right mix of corrosive.

We started the process by taking zoomed in images with our DSLR camera and zoom lens. That got us part of the way there but really didn’t show enough detail from the ground. The next step was to climb up the mast and look as closely as possible. We had read that taking high resolution images was a great way to inspect. This turned out to be a very good idea since the bright sun and the movement of the boat made it very difficult to get a good view. Using the images, we could zoom in and really see if there were issues.

Immediately we noticed rust staining at just about every joint in the system. We also found several very small stress cracks. As it turns out, stainless steel apparently corrodes from the inside out. This means that if you can see corrosion, it is likely much worse on the inside of the steel. After looking everything over we decided the best bet was to just replace it all.

We contacted a few local riggers to quote doing the full replacement for us. Turns out that is surprisingly expensive. We were given verbal quotes of between $10k and $15k. We let that sticker shock sink in a bit which led me to research doing it myself. I found a few sites with information on how to do it and all in all it seemed doable. We decided that we would pay a shop to make our new rigging and ship it to us then we would put it on.

We took a great deal of measurements and took a lot of pictures to get the quoting process started. We knew that we would have to pull the whole mast off the boat to get the final dimensions but we needed to get a basic idea first. We contacted several companies that could do the work and found that Sailing Services in Miami FL had the best prices as well as the best information and recommendations from others.

Finally, the day came to pull the mast down and get all of the old wiring off the boat. Since our mast is 50’ long above the deck of the boat and it is a rather large piece of aluminum extrusion, this required hiring a crane and operator to meet us at a nearby marina. The crane was strapped to the mast then we started removing all of the connection. Once down we were able to take off and label each wire so we could measure and prepare them for replacement.

We took our final measurements and wrapped up half of the wiring to send off the Sailing Services. Once they received everything they went to work getting it replaced. Our new rigging arrived in a little more than a week. It was much nicer and cleaner than the old stuff.

While we waited for the new rigging we did some work on the mast. This was the best time to take apart the in-mast furling gear (this allows our mainsail to be stored inside the mast) and grease it. Since the mast was down it was also the best time to replace the wiring inside it as well as the lights on it. We also did an inspection on the entire mast and re-bedded the mast step and chain plates…more on that fiasco in another post.

We spent another few days preparing the new rigging by setting everything to the old measurements. Several of the wires have turn buckles on them so that they can be adjusted to the correct tension. Since we knew the lengths for the old wire we configured the new wiring to match so we would be ready.

After a lot of hard work and anticipation finally the day to put our sailboat back together came. We prepared the mast to go back up and brought the boat over. Putting it up went fairly quickly which was sort of surprising. We didn’t spend a lot of time tuning the rig which could be done late so it was really just all about getting it back on the boat.

Once it was attached someone had to go up the mast again to remove the crane strap and connect the wind instrument. I quickly volunteered to rid the “sky hook.” I got strapped in and the crane operator lifted me all the way to the top of the mast.

After getting the boat all back together and into sailing shape we decided it was a good idea to do an underwater inspection. This is where we look through the boat at all of the underwater things (from the inside of the boat) for leaks. Surprise….a leak…