Monday, August 25, 2008

Battening down the hatch!



Sunday was a work day. We had a leaky hatch. Normally that isn’t a problem but with all of the rain we’ve had recently, it makes overnighting on the boat unpleasant. We had to fix it as it has become progressively worse. We only hope that it’s the seal on the hatch and not something much more insidious and sinister…

We had no trouble at all getting the screws out and prying the hatch off. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. We cleaned off all surfaces with denatured alcohol. I sealed around the inside where the gellcoat meets the teak molding with life calk.

Next we laid out a roll black of weather stripping that we had leftover from doing our portlights. It is great stuff. It comes in a big roll and is very easy to work with. We used an extra little bit on each screw hole, leaving two to use as guides, to seal around the screws. Then we replaced the hatch and used clamps to squish the weather stripping until we could get the screws to catch.

Bruce applied a bead of white lap calk to seal the outside edge. He then slowly and painstakingly applied the clamp and screwed in all of the screws. He did just a little at a time so this took forever. We quit when it seemed that the goo was squeezing out around the edges uniformly to form a seal. WE HOPE!!





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