Sunday, April 28, 2013

Dealing With The Deluge

Spice rack
I guess ALL boats have leaks.  If you say yours doesn't, you're either lying or you just haven't found it yet...

Our boat has a couple of known issues that are awaiting my retirement for fixing.  THIS one has been a mystery to us.  We don't get a lot of rain here in South Texas, mostly light showers now and then.  Every once in a while, we get a "toad floater".  When this happens, we are reminded of our mystery leak.  Random wetness in our spice rack, seemingly unrelated to any sign of dripping.

We run our fingers along every possible point of entry above this rack and feel NOTHING!  It has stumped us... until now!

Our most recent big rain brought more water in than just that on the spice rack.  Bruce found all of our coffee filters wet this morning when he made the coffee.  We took everything out of that cubby (how did all of that go into that tiny cabinet?) and we found puddles on the top and bottom shelves.
Water dripped from the white ledge center



















Upon closer inspection, we found water filling the trough along the inside lip of the cabin liner.  It was filled to overflowing by some means of ingress yet to be determined.














We followed the ridge and discovered the culprit!  There is a relatively wide space between the back wall of our galley and the wall in our shower stall aft.  

Bruce opened the access panel in the shower wall where there is access to our main power source to the boat.  






A recently replaced electrical hookup evidently has a faulty gasket which is allowing water to gush in.  Evidently the gasket was already doing a poor job of keeping water out.  When Bruce disturbed it to replace the power receptacle, the gasket just gave it up.  This was not evident until the next big rain!
   THIS fix was quite an easy one.  I got to use my favorite butyl tape to seal all possible entry points and when we were done screwing the face plate back on... a quick test with the water hose proved the wondrous powers of butyl tape once again.  SUCCESS!

Now... how are we going to get all these tools back into that locker with that CAT in the way?

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