Quest Nº 4 Fully assess the damage

We hauled out Oiysh our retired racing boat to take care of a crack around it's stern tube and leaky keel bolts, which together were allowing roughly 200l of sea water to enter every 8-10h.

Soon we realized the adventure was only beginning. As we gained more overview by removing our diesel engine and dropping the keel we were finding more and more gems.

What we think happened was that someone at some point hit something, or run her a ground hard. All of the damage we uncovered seemed to confirm that hypothesis. All the cracks, de-lamination and de-laminated stringers seemed to be consistent with the back of the keel wanting to push into the boat after being abruptly stooped.

You know the whole deal with Newtons Laws of motion.

An object in motion stays in motion and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Anyhow we had removed all the major obstacles so it was time for Quest no 4 Fully asses the damage.

Well there was one more tiny obstacle. As I mentioned previously Oiysh is a retired racer. She was actually build for Sydney Hobart Yacht race which she finished at 4th place in 1986 ( 1st in division B) under her originally name Paladin.

We don't know her full history but at some point she was registered and raced in US, and the owner at the time put in additional 500kg of ballast into her. We assume it was done to adhere to the class rules as the blueprints we have do not show that additional ballast.

We don't plan to race her in any official capacity so it was simply dead weight. We needed access underneath it anyhow, so it was decided that just as our diesel engine the lead slabs were to be removed and were not coming back.

Between the engine, everything around it and the lead we got rid of almost 1ton of weight so we were quite happy about it.

After the lead was gone we could proceed to chisel away all the de-laminated fiberglass, filler and rotten stringers.

We had 2 stringers that where detached from the hull and one of them was also cracked, both saturated with oil where the detached wood was exposed. After some deliberation we decided that we will be removing only the bad parts as replacing the stringers fully was way to big of a job that we had neither the time nor the money to tackle.

The first cut reviled that the damage was going further than we initially thought. That seemed to be the general theme of this refit. On the second try we managed to get to healthy wood that was still firmly attached to the hull.

The plan was to insert a new piece of wood in between the healthy remnants of the old stringer. The wood we had access to unfortunately didn't have the same dimensions as the original peace but the idea was we will make up for the difference with additional layers of fiberglass.

The second stringer we tackled was a bit more complicated as we didn't have access from all sides and getting access to properly fiberglass everything back in place would require enormous amount of destruction. Like getting rid of the engine base and opening the two compartments that were holding the original lead ballast. This was a can of worms we decided not to open.

Removing all the damaged wood and also a bit of healthy one involved some boat yoga, at the end though the space where the new wood would be slotted in was prepared. We were fully aware that this approach might bite us in the but further down the road. Still we decided to leave it for the future us to worry about especially that our stern tube/ bilge situation was evolving as well.

Our initial happy thoughts were that fixing it would involve only reinforcing the weak spots and cracks with additional fiberglass. The biggest challenge we thought we were facing here was how to fiberglass it well within the tiny amount of space, as our bilge is rather a bilge box and a tiny one at that.

Bartek kept on chiseling away de-laminated fiberglass and uncovering the mayhem that was our bilge area. For this part of the job we used mostly the chisel and hammer duo for a lot of reasons but mostly two:

• For one using the grinder to do it would only spread out the oily grime that seeped in between the layers.

• Secondly and more important we were actually living on board while all of this fun and games was happening so we wanted to limit the inevitable fiberglass dust to a minimum.

Soon we realized that we were dealing with layers upon layers of fixes and the only reasonable approach would be to cut out the bilge box completely and build it again from scratch. There was just too much of de-lamination, oil socked Kevlar and wood for us to justify leaving it in place.

But that was a quest for another day for now we focused on preparing all the new wood. It was cut to size sanded.

The one bigger piece was quite straight forward. The pieces for the other stringer were a bit more fiddly but eventually everything was dry fitted and ready for when it was time to epoxy them back

in place.

Anyone that has ever done any kind of refit be it a boat, rv or a house knows that before you start building there is usually a lot of destruction first. It can be bad for morale so to keep up my positive spirit I decided to clean the backing plates. What can I say it's the small things in life.

Then we washed everything for the 100th time, I now that I'm probably repeating myself but I truly don't want to have to deal with diesel ever again. We also set up a chamber with a heat gun to help dry out the old healthy wood that was now clean but wet.

There was also the small side job of rerouting the water coming in from our mast so it wouldn't soak the drying wood as well as later mess up the epoxy job. That one was fairly easy a simple barrier from polyurethane did the trick redirecting the water to the bathroom.

Speaking of side jobs, as we decided at this point that our Volvo Penta was not coming back on board we wanted to get rid of the thru-hull for the salt water intake. Easy peasy right? Well not really seems that it was mounted extremely well and it took us an hour to get it out.

Still the creative destruction wasn't done yet everything was starting to look better but we still had some things to do before we could start to rebuild.

Next quest on the horizon was getting rid of the old bilge box.