Episode 6 Finding the keel

The biggest problem facing me was having no idea of what I was looking for. All I knew was that the swing keel swung on a bolt (the keel pin) near the front of the keel box, and that it was becoming harder and harder to get it up and down.

Sensibly, you might suggest that I take a look at it, but taking a look was almost impossible. The keel was secreted in the sealed keel box with nothing but a small window at the front to show if it was up or down. When the keel was on the trailer, the under quarters of the trailer blocked the view from underneath; and when the keel was in the water it was, well, wet. Even if I had been game enough to go swimming under the boat (in the murky harbour among the Bull Sharks) I would not have seen much more than the edges of the keel. I even tried a borescope, but all that I could see was that the inside of the keelbox was narrow and filled with a large object that was, presumably, the keel.  I had to work with what I knew about the keel behaviour, and make some educated guesses, some of which, as I'll describe later, proved to be wrong.

Being over 30 years' old, the boat had no drawings and, so it seemed, no one alive who could remember how it was built. If you can imagine someone asking you what your spleen looks like, and you neither have access to Gray's Anatomy (or the TV series derivative) nor a desire to cut open your own belly with one of the knives in your kitchen drawer, you might sense the scope of my ignorance. It was like shooting in the dark with a gun that you'd only heard someone mention in a crime novel.

My wife, quite reasonably suggested that I take the boat to a boat mechanic. I decided it against it for a number of reasons, being

1. I was out of work and had more time than money, and could not afford to pay someone else to do what I could do, even if I took four times as long;
2. A boat mechanic would have to go through the same process of deduction to find what was there; and
3. My belligerence, frankly, tempered by a more laudable curiosity to find out how the keel was constructed, what was going wrong with it and how it might be fixed.

But first, some history.

The keel had been getting harder and harder to lower and raise, and the problems started to manifest around January 2016. To start with, the no-name Chinese electric winch that winds in the cable that raises the keel seemed suspect, so I replaced it with a Ridge Ryder 1500lb (680kg) winch. That taught me about winches, but the keel still stuck.

I thought it might be the battery not giving enough "umph" to the electric winch, so I fitted a 20W solar panel on the rear handrail to trickle charge the battery between sailing trips, together with an Sunyo MPPT controller and an unfinished re-wiring project.  This rewiring project also needed a new bespoke fitted cabinet to house the new MPPT, switch panel, radios etc, which took several weeks to manufacture. This worked insofar as I grounded the boat whilst sailing around St Helena Island at low tide in February 2017, but all I needed to do was wind the keel up using my freshly charged battery, turn the boat around and sail off the sandbank that I had just hit.

Finally, in April 2017, the keel got itself well and truly stuck in the down position. Fortunately, my crew and I managed to drag the boat onto the concrete of the boat ramp, which must have pushed the keel partly up again, and then onto the trailer, so at least it was out of the water and ready to be transported somewhere for some attention. Also, we had just finished building a car port at home, which included some cleverly constructed sliding beams under the ceiling for the very purpose of hoisting the boat off the trailer for maintenance. I decided to seize the opportunity to un-seize the keel.

The first hurdle was getting into the keel box, which was harder than it should have been. Not knowing how the keel box was constructed, I thought it was a relatively simple case of getting the table off. The table is a plank of pine fixed to the top of the keelbox. Not only does it provide something to dine off, it stops any water in the keelbox from entering the cabin. Also, it serves as a horizontal prop between the compression post and the companionway bulkhead that helps to stop the keelbox from buckling under the load applied by the winch when it winds in the cable to raise the keel. Very clever.

What I did not realise was that the compression post sat directly on the top of the keelbox, and I ended up smashing the table to get it off. The engineer in me objects to breaking things in order to maintain them, but there you are. I thought the compression post passed through a hole in the keelbox onto a stainless steel plate (part of the sheave assembly) below, and all that was holding it in place was the excess from some liberally applied varnish and various layers of silicon and other goo smeared along the top of the keel box to seal it. By the time I had chiselled and cut and levered the table up, I realise that I had actually made the hole I thought was there and I had split the table along the grain, as the following photo shows. There was nothing for it but to take a saw to the remains and think about how to replace it all.

Austral 20 keel box from the starboard side. The table has been levered off keel box. The compression post is still in place, standing on a stainless steel plate that is part of the keel-lifting sheave assembly

Austral 20 keel box, from the front, with table partly removed and lodged part way up the compression post. The keel-lifting sheave assembly is at the front of the keel box, and the photo shows the upper plate and upper pulley wheel. The keel cable passes from a shackle on the top front of the keel, through two sheaves (pulley wheels) on the sheave assembly to the winch located towards the rear, behind the rear cabin bulkhead. The wood chips on the floor are the result of my exertions in getting the table up.

Austral 20 keel box with table fully removed, showing the compression post standing on the upper plate of the keel-lifting sheave assembly.

This destruction did give me my first look at the keel, or at least the trailing edge of it. I think the blue and brown colours are quite beautiful in the photo, but they spelled out one word loud and clear - rust. When steel rusts, it expands to about 18 times the volume of the parent metal. What I suspected was that the sides of the keel had rusted, and it was the expanded rust between the sides of the keel and the inside face of the keel box that was causing the keel to jam. It was a snug fit, though. You couldn't even get a sheet of paper between the sides of the keel and the keel box. There was only one solution - get the boat on the hoists and get the keel out.

Austral 20 swing keel in keel box, from above, showing signs of rust. The keel box is about 40mm wide and the keel fits snugly inside.