[Public-List] A new adventure...
Jonathan Bresler
262alberg30 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 3 10:58:37 PDT 2020
Gord,
Wow! Well done handling the issue on the spot
and addressing the damage that resulted.
Jonathan
On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 1:29 PM George Dinwiddie via Public-List <
public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:
> Gord,
>
> I'm glad you and Caroline are mostly OK. And the boat, too, of course.
> What an adventure!
>
> - George
>
> On 7/3/20 11:21 AM, Gordon Laco via Public-List wrote:
> > 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
> >
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> When I remember bygone days George Dinwiddie
> I think how evening follows morn; gdinwiddie at alberg30.org
> So many I loved were not yet dead, http://www.Alberg30.org
> So many I love were not yet born. also see:
> 'The Middle' by Ogden Nash http://idiacomputing.com
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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--
Jonathan M Bresler
S/V Constance Alberg 30 #262
Annapolis/Eastport MD
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