The leak, pulpit, and tropical storm - Part 1

No, it's not a movie with Steve Martin and John Candy.

I had looked everywhere I could think of in the cabin for the source of the leak that was manifesting itself in the Head. I had poked, inspected, and tested everywhere I could imagine that water could be getting in. All of that testing left me with one conclusion. The water had to be getting in at the bow pulpit. Of course I was hoping that I could just rebed or reseal something.

That was not to be the case.

In looking at the anchor chain passthrough from the underside, I could see that there was a gap between the deck and the pulpit. I knew that had to be where the water was ingressing. You can see the gap here if you look hard.

I knew that meant the pulpit had to come off and I knew that meant the boat needed to come out of the water, anchor removed and bow rails removed. NOT a small job. As the boat came out of the water I found out that there was a tropical storm headed my way. Leaky cabin + tropical storm = big problem. Fortunately, the manager at my marina was nice enough to let me move the boat into the dry storage facility. It was off season, and since it was raining anyway, it wasn't a big deal for them.





And so the work began. My buddy Fred had "volunteered" to come up and help out. A decision he would soon regret



The first thing I discovered was that the windlass had not been properly bedded, which explained the leak. But the rot had to be repaired and I couldn't figure a way to fix the leak without pulling the pulpit, so we continued removing it.












When the pulpit was off, we were greeted with this sight. That's teak you are looking at. Rotted, soaking wet, teak. The good news is that it came off really easily. The bad news was I knew we were going to have to engineer a replacement.

By now it was midnight (ish) and both of us were exhausted from working in the Florida heat. We called it a night.