Well, as many of you know, Pauline's job is classified as essential, so she has been working and thus bringing in a paycheck. Mark however has not worked for money since the first week of June. He has taken the time off to do some much needed repairs on Sari Timur. The biggest ones are the leak in the aft cabin and refurbishing the wheel.
We have been chasing a leak in the aft cabin since shortly after crossing the North Pacific. Because of where the drip was happening we suspected that it was coming down through or around one of the fittings for the dinghy davits/mizzen traveler. However, numerous attempts at rebedding and caulking around these fittings did nothing. After a couple of years, we finally had dry rot in the ceiling panel above the aft cabin window. Mark decided to attack this with pry bars, chisels, hammers, sawzall etc until he finally had the whole underside exposed. Luckily this year has been one of the rainiest on record and once exposed from underneath, Mark began tracking the trails. The culprit prove to be some rot in some of the joints near deck level in the aft deck boxes. So in between rainstorms, Mark began to dig and repair the spots. There were four areas in total plus some rot had opened up a seam where the teak deck meets the box. After a few weeks, the last of the leaks was discovered and the seams recaulked. The leaks were finally stopped! Note these boxes are glassed on the inside to make them waterproof but that means the water, if it enters the way it did, it wicks a long way before it can find an exit.
So now he had to fix all the rotted spots in the aft cabin. This meant repairing or replacing some of the boxes support beams and reinforcing the floor of the box. The beams were not hard, some wood and epoxy and a lot of cursing and it was soon done. The bottom of the boxes were plywood and most of this had been scraped out so rather than replace with new plywood, Mark decided to glass from underneath which is kind of like glassing upside down. We felt that this would not only be a better way to make the fit more water tight, it would also strengthen the whole support structure better. If you have ever glassed upside down in a tight space you know the drama that this required. If you haven't, consider yourself lucky! We then also decided to put foam insulation panels in between the beams to help with insulation.
The next step was to refit the panel. He made a template and then traced this out onto a piece of half inch marine ply. Pauline took a day off of work to help him do this and fit the panel. It took about four attempts with a little shaving off here and there before it slipped into place but finally it was up and in. It still requires a bit off faring to match the panels next to it but we are happy with the results. It is the end of the fishing season so our normally well stocked chandlery is short on a lot of things including faring material but some is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday.
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| On both sides of the panel the surfaces were also damaged this is mostly what requires the faring before painting |
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| The Panel Finally Fits and Is In! |
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| What the boxes look like from outside |
The other big project was refurbishing the wheel. We have mentioned our wheel in a post long ago, but for those that don't remember it is nearly 75 years old and used to steer the British East India Steamship, Kampala. The original owner of Sari Timur (called Freedom II) in those days took the Kampala to the scrap yard in the Middle East back when he was fitting out Sari Timur. He felt the wheel was too pretty to be destroyed so he carried it back to Taiwan and fitted it to the sailboat. It has been a showpiece in the cockpit ever since. But it was looking a bit decrepit so again Mark got after it. There are still some remaining coats required but it looks much better now. And we are hoping for breaks in the rain to finish it off before winter.
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| Our Wheel |
