Drip The By Barbara Molin


runs down again, past the stainless steel water tank (the kind that rusts), under the seat and still further down into the bilge where the bilge pump finally gets rid of it to where it belongs. It’s such a small drip and such a big annoyance. When I first noticed the salty


stain on my brand new cushions, I pulled them out to dry on deck. I then unscrewed the deck plate for the port aft shrouds, scraped off the old caulking as well as I could with a screwdriver, taped around the area carefully and covered the teak deck underneath the deck plate with fast setting, 5200 sealant. I pressed down on the plate and screwed it down again. I was so proud of myself that I decided to redo the caulking on all the other shroud deck plates, five more in total. The next time I sailed upwind, the


drip was there again. Drat, I said to myself. Drat and double drat. What now?


Once again, I unscrewed the deck All boats leak, don’t they? If not right away then eventually.


We search for the illusive drip and then caulk and seal and seal and caulk in a never ending yet optimistic quest for a dry boat. Is success possible, or will it eventually drive us crazy?


I have this annoying drip inside


Eidos, my 32-foot East Orient, whenever it rains hard or when I’m sailing to windward on the port tack. It falls on the teak deck, then runs


down it’s sloping surface until it works itself under the port aft chainplate deck plate (quite a mouthful isn’t it? Try saying it faster) and drips down, (as drips do) following the chainplate, past the nuts, washers and bolts which attach the chainplate to the hull and which the drip visits on its way down, one at a time, quickly causing them to rust.


It rushes down the smooth metal,


until it rolls down and thirstily soaks into the back of the teak cover plate, which contributes on the front side to the beauty of my cabin. So far. Then it sneaks down on the


48° NORTH, MARCH 2011 PAGE 36


bookshelf and saturates the bottoms of my Bowditch, World Cruising Routes, West Marine Catalogue, Reed’s Nautical Almanac for the Caribbean, and copies of recent 48° North magazines. Still not happy, the drip finds


a route further down, between the bookshelf and the hull into my canned goods locker tucked away behind the settee cushions. There it pools lovingly around canned beans, tomato sauce, tuna and sardines; lovingly ravaging the tin cans with its rust producing properties, I might add. Still not satisfied, it finds cracks


between the plywood settee back and the canned storage shelf to saturate the seat cushions below. My new, beautiful settee cushions. Then, if the rain or the passage is long enough, and the drip persistent, it


plate and scraped off the now solid sealant (ever try removing 5200?). Of course the deck plate cannot be lifted high enough for easy access at the cavity underneath it where the chain plate pierces the deck. The first time, I just gooped stuff on top of the deck next to the chainplate and left most of the old sealant in the cavity. This time I would have to re-do the whole thing. (Why do we never have enough time to do something right the first time, but always have enough time to do it again?) A fellow boater suggested that


the drip enters the teak deck through one of the screw holes that holds the deck down and then travels between the planking and the fiberglass deck underneath, slowly working its way to the chainplate at the level of the fiberglass. So sealing on top of the deck would not have solved my drip problem. I had to get down to the fiberglass. To do that, I had to remove the


shrouds, so that I could take the deck plate off completely for better access at the hole beneath. I did that silently praying that the mast would not fall on me in gratitude. Then I turned into a dentist, poking and digging and scraping the cavity around the chain plate. A good hour later I had most of


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