"Seacocks" ... For the non-sailors reading this, a seacock is a shut-off valve screwed into a hole in the bottom of your boat below the waterline. They are necessary because you need to take in water to cool your engine, flush your heads and drain your sinks,etc. I read somewhere that failed seacocks (or hoses attached to them) are the #1 reason boats sink. Sinbad has 11 seacocks! That's a lot of holes in the bottom of a boat, especially when it's YOUR boat! Sinbad has lived her whole life in fresh water, which is great for us, since there is no salt-water corrosion. Every seacock that we could reach worked, and they worked well after I greased them. The key words here are "that we could reach". The early Whitby 42's were built with two seacocks hidden and completely inaccessible under the aft cabin floor. Not good. Whitby realized their mistake about a year after Sinbad was built and started putting in an access hatch so the seacocks could be serviced.
Now we're getting to the reason for this post. In previous post I was cutting up the starboard settee for the batteries, cutting up the old frig/freezer for the new one. So while I was in the cutting mood I cut an access hatch in the floor of the aft cabin. That's when Diane got worried and asked me not to cut anything else up until I finished these three projects. The bad thing was she was too late. I had already torn up the main salon deck hatch and cut all the wires to the old 12V electric panel! I was feeling like Toolman Tim Taylor on Home Improvement! Life was good! Life got better when Diane said she would fix the hole in the floor of the aft cabin. Cool!
Here are some photos of the job:
What you're looking at here is the hole I cut and the two seacocks. The removable wooden floor board to the left is access to the bilge pump and drive shaft. The two blocks of wood on the side of the hole secure the steps in place. The next step was to seal the cut with West System epoxy.
The white "border" in the hole is 1 x 3 boards that have been painted and glued in place with 5200. Diane then took the piece that was cut out, smoothed it down with her handy Dremmel tool, and faired the cut edges with epoxy.
When we get to a part of the world where teak is cheap, maybe we will replace the cut-out with something pretty! Happy Sails.......rr
It's true that the sea cocks can sink ya' in a minute and require regular maint. Plus your ought to "exercise" them from time to time to keep 'em from freezing up. Good article there Randy/Diane. I'm pretty sure Randy did the work on the sea cocks but Diane probably wrote it since most of it is correctly spelled. LOL!
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