We’ve hauled our three boats out of the water a total of 7 times. Each time, it’s been fucking miraculous. For the two weeks we had our boat on the hard at Yankee Marina in Yarmouth, ME, we worked 10-14 hours a day, every single day, rain or shine. We woke between 5am and 7am and went to bed as early as 9:30pm one night, but mostly between 11pm and midnight. So when we say that it is hard to give a detailed, blow-by-blow account of each thing we did, it’s because we did so much. The projects were multifaceted on every level, but really it came down to two major projects. One – the sagging, rotten deck. Two – the broken bulkhead below. Rather than tell this story in painful detail, here’s the last two weeks in pictures. This is the crack in the bulkhead, before we pulled the mast. As you can see, it is completely separated along a vertical axis and cracked horizontally above right through the fiberglass, creating a sag where the mast wants to pull through the deck. This caused cracking all throughout the coach roof. Once the mast was pulled, the compression system removed, and the step unbolted, it was time to make the cuts. We set the Skilsaw at 1/8″ and cut along the sagging seam of a previous repair. In an attempt to salvage whatever intact core material we could, we carefully chisel and pried the top skin upward. The second goal was to keep the top skin intact in order to use it again rather than recreate it. Instead of a tidy edge and an intact skin, the previous owners had done a very strange repair that forced us to clear the entire area of rotten material. We also couldn’t use[…]
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