28.) The Hole in the Boat

The photo above shows what may be the single biggest challenge I face in restoring #48. See the big hole in the boat?  That's right where the mast is supposed to be supported.

Holes are almost never a good thing in a boat.  But this is truly the last place you'd want one.  So....how did it get there?

This area of the hull probably absorbs the most stress of any spot in the Interclub. The mast in anything more than a light breeze pushes down into the boat, especially when the crew is hiking over the side. I found this out on my first day of racing, when the mast step on my virtually new fiberglass Interclub cracked and collapsed, forcing me to stop sailing for a month while I repaired it.

I don't think the original Sparkman and Stephens design fully recognized how much stress this area of the boat must handle (nor, for that matter, did the builder of my fiberglass boat: Karl's Boat Shop).

When I began working with #48 I realized I was going to face this problem. The area was cracked and showed lots of evidence of rot. I started chipping away at the bad wood and the next thing I knew I went right through the bottom. When I had finally removed all the unsalvageable material, I was left with the very un-hydrodynamic void you see in the photo.

There are several factors that make this especially challenging to fix.

First, the repair has to be super strong.  That should be obvious because this was the part of the boat that held up least well over time.

What's less obvious is that the repair area is a very complex shape. The keelson—or backbone of the boat that joins the starboard and port halves—starts at around two inches wide at the bow, gradually widens to 5 inches at midships and then tapers to four inches at the stern. The angle of the hull changes as it intersects the keelson, from around 90 degrees at the bow to something like 160 degrees three feet back from the bow. And, of course, the whole piece has to bend to conform to the shape of the bottom of the boat. So we're talking about a patch that constantly changes form through three dimensions.

Finally, the damage also extended into the planking, making matters even more troublesome.

For months, I have been tempted to remedy the problem in a radical way. I'd saw the boat in half right down the middle, remove the entire keelson (also ok to spell it "kelson") and make a brand new one from stem to stern. Then I'd join the two halves to it.  I was convinced that this was not only one of the easiest ways to fix the problem (the keelson is cracked in other places as well and has another big hole back where the skipper must have stomped his feet a lot) but also would create the soundest repair.

Here's what a keelson looks like when a wooden boat is being built (upside down).  It is, for all practical purposes, the spine of a ship.  And mine has a big chunk of its backbone missing in probably the most critical area of the boat.

What stopped me, though, was that I realized that by the time I had finished removing the keelson, the remaining two hull halves would weigh less than a total of 70 pounds. To reduce the hull to less than half its original weight (minus spars and racing equipment) seemed to me to violate the whole spirit of a restoration project. I would, in effect, be building a new boat using little more than scraps from the original one. I decided this would run afoul of the spirit of the class rules prohibiting construction of new wooden boats (something I wrote about earlier in this blog. See Holes and Loopholes).

So....what to do instead?  

I've got another plan. And you can see the first stages of it if you enlarge the picture at the top and inspect the keelson just in front of the hole. There, I have started roughing out what looks like a flight of stairs that gradually ascend toward the bow.

I'll explain more about how (I hope) this is all going to work out in upcoming posts.

Below is a photo of what the area around the mast step looked like before I started chopping away at it:

Some people might have try a different, quicker approach than removing the rotten, cracked wood. They'd undoubtedly use a penetrating epoxy product that is supposed to infuse the wood with its original equivalent strength. I don't believe the hype and think diluted epoxy is a half-assed fix.  I am only up for complete-ass fixes.