Project time — Cupcake Afloat

So I was thinking about that spinnaker picture in the January 11 post and how fantastic it looks. Perfect day, perfect wind, perfect location. All true. It also got me thinking about what, amid all this perfection, is likely to break next. That train of thought got me thinking about preventative maintenance. And here we are.

Over the weekend I rummaged around in my engine-maintenance-parts bucket and pulled out a filter, an impeller, and all sorts of zincs. Before lunch I inspected the pencil zinc that lives in the bowels of the engine. The zinc shows a little bit of self-sacrifice as you can see in the picture, but it’s certainly not ready to be replaced. Good.

Then I changed the littlest of our fuel filters because although I changed the big paper fuel filter at the same time I did that messy oil change last fall, I didn’t change the little one. Done.

Ellen cleaned the engine raw water strainer while I dug into the next little task. My job involved taking a look at the raw water impeller which has been loyally spinning its little heart out for about 300 engine hours now. The impeller was about to lose a vane, so it’s fortunate I thought to check on the thing when I did. It appears 250 hours is probably a better replacement schedule than 300.

Moss, quietly reading, noticed all the hubbub and wanted to know what broke. Nothing. Maintain it so you don’t have to fix it. There will always be something broken sooner or later.

Ate the last of an apple pie for lunch (Moss had a quesadilla, Ellen is an epiphyte so we just misted her with water from a spray bottle) and then jumped in to add a zinc to the propeller shaft and try to replace two other zincs that live on the keel.

Our boat has a centerboard, but we never saw much benefit when we used the centerboard and ultimately realized its Rube Goldberg lifting mechanism was a sink-the-boat-if-it-fails kind of setup. And it was leaking. So a few years ago we removed and capped the lifting system and pinned the board in the up position with a beefy stainless steel bolt. That bolt gets two zincs because if the bolt fails and the board pivots down, we suddenly have an 8’ draft.

The prop shaft zinc went on with no trouble. But the board zincs are another story. When the boatyard installed the big bolt this spring, they probably figured the zincs would be changed annually when the boat is hauled for the winter.

Unfortunately, it looks like I will have to modify the replacement teardrop zincs I bought in Nassau because they have a smaller bolt hole than will fit the centerboard bolt. So I’ve drilled out a larger hole but still need to find a way to make it even bigger so I can countersink the washer. This project will take some thinking and a few days. One reason for delay is that the Dremel I would use to enlarge the hole for the washer is otherwise occupied. It is occupied with a dirty little secret.

Dirty little secret time. Cupcake has soft spots. These old fiberglass sailboats have decks that were made with an outer skin of fiberglass, a core of balsa wood for stiffness, and an inner skin of fiberglass. That sandwich worked great for years and was light and strong.

Then, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, water got inside the sandwich and everything went bad. The water rotted the balsa. That evil has happened in a spot on our cabin top where water worked its way in through several of the many screw and bolt holes up there. The balsa core is so rotten that the deck flexes and I had to write “NO STEP” on the soft spot in Sharpie so Simon and Zachary would remember not to step there.
Saturday I finally got around to starting the repair, made 80% of the cut in the fiberglass skin around the soft spot. Then the rain began. Also the battery in my Dremel cutting tool died. As I told Moss, it’s not that big a deal that water is getting inside the deck through the cuts in that spot because the core really can’t get any more wet. But I’m still not all that pleased that Saturday was the rainy day. It wasn’t raining when I started. Friday was hot and sunny. Shortwave weather forecast made no mention of rain squalls.

Once the rain let up, I finished the cut and pried the skin up to take a look at the nastiness underneath. The balsa was probably blond-colored when it was installed, but the water made it rot and turn black and mushy. So mushy. So rotten. We had a pleasant time scooping out all the mush and cleaning things up in preparation for the next step: replacing the core.

Bailing the case. (That’s a Moby Dick reference for you.) — Bailing the case. (That’s a *Moby Dick* reference for you.)

When we were in St. Augustine I scored a piece of Divinycell from a marine supply warehouse. Divinycell is what Pearson should have used instead of balsa wood in 1986 when they built the boat. People knew well before then that balsa cored boats rotted. But Pearson probably did not want to spend for the non-rotting alternative core. In any event, the stuff we bought is some kind of semi-flexible plastic material that has good compression strength, bends enough to match the curves and imperfections of a boat deck, and will not rot.

On Saturday night it rained more than it has any day since we started this trip (not counting hurricanes). Fortunately, we covered the hole in the deck with a hatch umbrella. Fortunately the core was soaked anyway so more water didn’t really make any difference. Fortunately it was hot and sunny the next day.

Everything dried out nicely, we fit the replacement core, epoxied it in place, epoxied the skin back on top, then waited.

This morning we finished cutting the no-skid covering we are using to hide the cuts in the deck and stuck it in place. The project came out pretty well and met the goal of reinforcing the soft spot so we can now walk on it without fear of falling through the roof.

Winds are supposed to be very light for the remainder of the week, so we may go spearfishing on the east side of the islands, out in the Exuma Sound. Usually those waters are too rough for us to snorkel, but with light winds from the west, today is our chance. We intend to enjoy the mild weather this week because it sounds like there are some extremely fierce winds predicted for the weekend and possibly all of next week.

I’m trying to figure out how to put minutes on my Batelco cell phone so I can keep posting this riveting stuff.

The cook made these two fabulous loaves of bread and we gobbled them up.

Thunderball from the northeast. Somewhere in that shadow is the backside of the big blue cave opening from the December 26 photo.

Selfie. Ellen says the majority of these pictures are in the galley because we never let her out.