Doesn't It Seem Like We're Leaning A Little?

So on the 7th we were back in our slip, safe and sound.   We were listing pretty good to the port side due to having drained all of the fuel out of the starboard tank, but all was good.  We had some water and coolant in the engine room due to blowing a radiator hose, no biggie we'll get started on that in the morning; we're not taking on water it's all good.

Tuesday, November 8th we head back down to the boat and notice that we're listing considerably more than we were the afternoon before. Hmmm.... not good!  We checked the engine room and found that we had more water than the afternoon before... WHAT?!!!  We started opening the hatches and found more and more water.  Great.  We got to thinking that maybe our freshwater tank blew and had drained into the boat. No such luck.

One of our first major purchases for the boat last March was a new dewatering pump.  We were able to pump almost all of the water out of the hatches in well under an hour.  It's nice to know that in an emergency we'll be able to dewater our boat or anyone elses rapidly!

After dewatering the hatches and getting the engine room mostly drained, I opened the hatch to the lazarette to check on the vacuming I needed to do and saw that there was water in there that hadn't drained to the engine room. Upon closer inspection I saw that there was water coming in through the bottom of the hull.... SERIOUSLY??! 

Thankfully we weren't in immediate danger of sinking, but we needed to get that leak stopped. We picked up a wooden plug and a dowel up at Harri's and headed back to the boat.  Dave and Rosa worked on plugging the hole while I went to get a haircut.  By the time I came back the hole was plugged and almost all of the water was out of the boat.  The hole in the hull isn't quite a big around as a standard wooden pencil.

Dave called the welder to discuss getting the hole permanently fixed and they came up with a quick solution.  We're going to drill out the existing hole and put bolt through it with a lock washer and nylar nut.  This means we won't have to cut steel out and replace it, compromising our skookum paint job!

So, now we wait for the tides and weather to be just right so we can get up on the grid to fix this hole.

~Misty~