[Public-List] A new adventure...

[Gordon Laco]

Hello friends,

So there we were last Saturday… motoring along toward Gull Rock, with Hotchkiss Rocks to port, and the distinctive white cottage on the island behind them.  We were doing 6.5 knots with the northwest wind on the nose, scooting toward Minnicognashene Channel hoping for a bit of air outside and a nice galloping reach home to Midland.

I was just thinking ‘man this engine is smooth and quiet… we’re going at near full throttle and we can talk in normal tones… not like in Touch Wood with her monster British Seagull for which flat out was 4.2 and the whole boat shaking so much if you put a coffee down it would walk off the cockpit seat, and speaking was only possible by shouting.

Then I was thinking ‘haha better not praise the engine in case it hears me and decided to show me who’s boss by developing something…’ Caroline said ‘I think we need to be a little more to starboard… Gull Rock should be on the bow and it isn’t.’    

I glanced over to port at the visible part of Hotchkiss Rocks and said ‘ya, but they’re well over, I think we’re…'

KA-BLAM!

We were thrown off our feet.  Caroline slammed her head into the frame of the companionway…. she was bent over looking at the chart.   I went forward over the steering wheel and pedistal.

What happened?  An explosion?  I was in the military and know what an explosion sounds and feels like.  I got up and glanced around and down the companionway… no smoke, no fire, deck was intact…..  The boat was afloat and almost motionless in the water although the engine was still running at 1400rpm.   Heading… wow, we’re suddenly turned 90 degrees to starboard… what happened?

I closed the throttle… the engine slowed but wouldn’t go down to idle… then as we gathered way on the strange new course, I saw just under the surface, a rock.   There was a huge rock just under the surface under our bow.

We’d hit the northern outlying rock of the Hotchkiss Rocks group.     Caroline, holding her forehead, saw it too and jumped down into the cabin and lifted the floorboards… no inrushing water.

I put the transmission in neutral but the engine began racing so I put it in gear again.  I gave her the wheel and jumped below to open the motor cover…  I expected to see the engine jumped forward off its mounts which in my racing imagination, I thought might be preventing the teleflex control from pushing the throttle shut.   No, all looks well in there.  I asked Caroline to accelerate the engine… the lever on the carb moved properly… I asked her to close it, it only went half way.  I could complete the movement manually, but she couldn’t with the control up in the cockpit.  

I tossed all the gear that had been thrown forward by the crash into the bunks and checked the bilges again… no flooding.  I decided to keep the engine running in case we needed it’s cooling pump as an extra bilge pump.

Back up topside, we removed the top disc of the steering pedestal and saw that the throttle lever had been jumped forward on its vertical connecting rod.  A couple of minutes work with a wrench and it griped in the correct place again.  I guess I’d hit it on my way over the wheel and hit it hard enough to make it slip… incredible.

We made it home in due course… I had a big bruise on my stomach and Caroline developed a goose-egg bruise on her forehead.  After supper we went back to check the boat…. the bilges were full.    I pumped her out, and checked before bed at 11…. bilges full again.  We had a hull breach.

Fortunately there is a commercial marina next door to the club, so I phoned up the manager there and told him we needed a quick lift out…  fortunately a friend’s cradle which would fit SURPRISE was handy… ours was over at our winter berth in another port.   

So up we came out of the water, and there at the front of SURPRISE’s encapsulated ballast, was the wound made by the rock.   Water was running out of it, and there was a messy flap of shattered fibreglass hanging down.  I was instantly glad I’d hauled out and not tried a half-assed quick repair to get through the season till regular haul out in November.  Yes, I am ashamed to say I considered that.

Once ashore, and safely in John’s cradle, I drilled two 3/8” diameter holes in the centre of the wound, and a third as low on the face of the knuckle of the keel as I could get my drill.   Three fountains of water started coming out and continued for over an hour before tapering off to oozing.

The next day I returned with an angle grinder and laying beneath the boat, ripped off all the loose flabby shattered fibreglass, and dug into the lamination till I found solid glass structure.  I found I had two bites out of the hull… one in the centre and one off to starboard a little.  It seemed clearly that we’d hit rock with a square edge… bad for the boat, but perhaps good ultimately because we hadn’t slid up and get stuck on it.

I set up a heater to blow hot air on the wound to help dry it, and let it sit another 24 hours.  Fortunately the weather was clear and warm so there was no problem with leaving an electrical device going under the boat.

Back under the boat the next day, I used a hand held heat gun normally used for stripping varnish to make the surfaces of the wound really hot.  The surfaces felt dry, but of course moisture was still there waiting to creep back.  I painted on a thick coat of GFlex epoxy, a West product that is quite thick and achieves a bond even under water… this was my defence against the return of moisture in the lamination while the repair cured.  While that was setting, a process much accelerated by the heat, I made myself a stack of alternating fibreglass cloth roving and woven mat cut to roughly correspond to the profile of the wounds.  Some parts ended up five layers thick, others only two, depending on how deep the wound was at that part.   With the feathering out of the wounds, the area of the larger one was about the area of my hand with spread fingers, the other was about the size of the palm of my hand, but deeper that the larger one.

So after laying the cut-outs of cloth beside me, I flipped them over and laid them out again on a sheet of waxed paper.  I painted each one with regular epoxy before laying on the next, so eventually I had two sandwiches of cloth and epoxy all well wetted out.   I put a generous amount of somewhat thickened epoxy on top to ensure when I pressed the sandwiches into the wounds, there’d be no voids.   Then I took my caulking-gun style tube of thickened epoxy, put the tip, which I’d cut to fit into the drain holes I’d drilled, and cranked epoxy into the keel.  Alberg 30’s have very thick encapsulations but there is a space between the two or three inch thick glass exterior of the encapsulation and the iron ballast inside.  From what I could feel the space is something like an inch or so wide. This is normally filled with vermiculite at the factory when the boats were built...  Well no more… I cranked epoxy into the lower drain hole until it began coming out of the top holes.  I then slapped masking tape over them to hold the epoxy in while it cured.

Drawing a deep breath, I worked my hands under the clean side of the waxed paper, and lifted the sandwiches, one at a time, up into the wounds, then held them there with a solid ‘bandage’ of masking tape.

I put the heater back in place to keep the epoxy ‘excited’ in order to make sure it cured before having a chance to run out if I’d missed anything in my masking tape seal.

That night I came back and found the epoxy, which normally takes 24 hours to cure, had kicked off in a matter of hours due to the wound itself being hot, and the repair being warmed too.  I pealed off the bandage; it all came off easily.  The waxed paper stuck in places, but I dealt with that with a few strokes of 80 grit sandpaper.   Once the surfaces of both wound repairs were scuffed with the 80 grit, I wiped off the dust and applied further layers of glass and epoxy to fill the indents that occurred where I’d pressed the sandwiches up, then I put another tape bandage on, with no waxed paper this time.

The next day, yesterday, I returned and peeled off the tape, and sanded the whole job again.  I applied fibre reinforced fairing epoxy and sanded that smooth, then applied a lick of black bottom paint, and presto, repair done.   

This morning at 0800 the marina lifted SURPRISE back into the water… I think the whole incident is mostly behind me… Caroline’s forehead is better.

Lessons?  Well just because one has gone up and down a channel a hundred times doesn’t mean one shouldn’t at least eyeball the piloting with a little respect.   One thing that precipitated the accident, besides my complacency, was that we have high water here in the Upper Great Lakes this season, so the outlying rock at Hotchkiss which I was used to seeing, was this year under water.  Well I should have paid more attention to my relative bearings.

We hit that rock about as hard as it is possible for an Alberg 30 to hit anything.  6.5knots to a dead sudden stop was like a car accident.  I said at the top of this my first thought was that we’d had an explosion, and that is the truth.  I’m glad Caroline wasn’t hurt worse than she was…. I’m glad I was able to repair the boat…  I’m glad our boats have very very tough hulls.


Gord Laco
www.gordonlaco.com <http://www.gordonlaco.com/>
#426 SURPRISE