Episode 13 Other Boat Syndrome - Pathology and Treatment

I confess to succumbing to one of life's most pernicious pathologies - Other Boat Syndrome (OBS).

It must have had a rapid onset, occurring within a few weeks of acquiring my boat, brought on, possibly by a short episode of Buyers' Regret. Having made the diagnosis, I have come to terms with a long period of rehabilitation, which comprises a mix of Shock Therapy and a reformation of mind-habit.

OBS is not unlike BBS (Bigger Boat Syndrome); its lusts are quantifiably smaller, but the outcomes are the same. If you find yourself experiencing the following symptoms, you probably need help (the only prerequisite is that you already own a boat);

• You spend a disproportionally large amount of your on-line time browsing boat ads, or you actively contribute to forums that facilitate on-line boat-hunting.
• You find yourself drifting around the local boat club sizing your neighbours' boats, at every opportunity, especially during the time you should be sailing your own boat
• You can name the price, weight, rigging configuration and cabin layout of any boat in the same class as yours without any conscious effort
• You think your boat is the worst example in its class. Though this point might actually be true, you have already convinced yourself that the only course of action is to replace it (just as soon as your Admiral/Lord of the Treasury/Family Financier will grant you the funds)

If this is you, then I have good news. It doesn't have to be this way.

The Shock Therapy is both necessary and counter-intuitive. The necessary part requires you to part with your the Admiral's hard-earned as you fix up all the dreadful problems with your boat. For me, these mostly concerned the trailer, but when the hours are tallied up, fixing the keel proved just as expensive. Then, there was is the re-wiring and the countless small fix-ups and tinkerings. The counter-intuitive part is that these, or shocks of a similar magnitude, will probably be just as necessary in the Other Boat that you've been hankering after.

Breathe out and allow yourself to think that the Other Boat will be just the same old, slow, leaky tub as yours.

The reformation of mind-habit follows on. If the Other Boat is another slow, leaky, tub, do you really want to go through that agonising process of finding its problems, all over again? At least, with your current boat, you can say that you know where its problems lie.

I write this having taken my old, slow, leaky tub out into Moreton Bay for a race on Sunday. It performed surprisingly badly. I could not get it to point (head upwind) or maintain any speed. The winds were quite fresh (the hindcast reported 10-12 knots, but they felt more like 15) and every time a gust came through, the boat would heel (lean) over to about 40 degrees, promptly round up (stick its nose into the wind) despite my (heroic, or so I thought) efforts on the tiller. Then, it would stall and I would have to bear away and pick up speed again, only for the boat to heel, round up and stall again. I found that letting the mainsheet traveller down to leeward and bringin in the the mainsheet a little helped, because it changed the sheeting angle (the angle the sheet makes with the sail) to a more vertical setting, thus flattening the sail a little. But, there is only so much you can do with a blown-out, baggy sail.

Try as I might, I could not make the upwind leg of the course. In my defence, I was sailing against a rising tide, but the rest of the fleet managed it well enough. My tacking angle (the nearest I could sail to windward) had increased to something like 80 degrees, which made for lots of sailing east and west and hardly any progress north. The highest speed registered on my (almost dead) fish-finder was about 4 knots, which is probably an under-estimate, and well below the boat's hull speed (its design, or optimum speed) of 6 knots.

You have my permission to gasp in derision at these paltry figures. I had to turn around as the fleet passed me on the return leg, and limp back to port behind them. Which took a while because I was much slower than my handicap, even on a reach (which should be the fastest the boat will sail).

However, there were a few positives to take from this.

Firstly, I had confirmed that my the leak in my leaky keel bolt had almost gone. The boat took on less than half a litre of water over five hours in the water, and I could probably reduce the leak further by tightening the nut. (As described in Episode 12, the bolt is not bonded to the epoxy that now encases it in the keelbox, so a bit of tightening will probably do the trick, plus another dollop of Sikaflex, if necessary.)

Secondly, I had met with a Sailmaker the day before, with the intent of replacing my sails and standing rigging. I'll report on this further as the situation develops, but my boat's performance on the bay was typical of old, blown out sails. That is not surprising, because the youngest sail is my main (2007), but it is showing a pronounced fold at the front edge of its battens, and my foresails (especially the rust-marked old jib that I had up on Sunday) are goodness-knows-how-old. Add to that, I have a wire luff and profoundly soft standing rigging. There is no adjustment left in the standing rigging or, not enough to get it guitar-string tight, so it probably needs to go, too. My boat is in need of an overhaul above-decks, and that is why I called the Sailmaker. The condition laid on the approval of funds by the Admiral was that the leaky keel bolt had been fixed, and in that respect, my Sunday outing proved to be a success.

This latest episode in the long saga of throwing-money-into-a-hole-in-the-water gave me pause to think about my OBS. I believe it has helped me come to terms with it, which should content my soul a little more, and test the Admiral's patience a little less.

Upon reflection, I have come to the realisation that most boat ads focus on the obvious - the size of the boat, the number of people it can sleep (if you don't mind sleeping in a ménage à trois à plus) and how nice the paint looks.

Few, if any, ads speak about the state of the sails and the standing rigging. The standing rigging on trailer sailers takes some remarkable abuse because it is regularly dismounted and re-erected, with plenty of scope to get it out of tune, and to wear out the adjusting threads and nuts. The sails, likewise, have to suffer all sorts of inexpert flaking, unrolling and general neglect. Given that the state of the rigging and sails is the biggest factor in how well, or badly, the boat sails, a little inexperience on your part could leave you vulnerable to a prolonged bout of OBS upon the purchase of your first boat.

Where this might help mitigate your OBS is the realisation that boat ads usually demur from sails and rigging for a reason. The spacious-looking, shiny boat that you've feasted your eyes on might actually handle like a bucket of lard because of the state of things above-deck, and the owner is hardly likely to broadcast the fact.

On the other hand, you could get it for a knock-down price and spend the money you've saved on a new wardrobe for your new boat.

Oops, my OBS just kicked in again.

Episode 12 Drips

There are two reasons why this blog has slowed somewhat of late. The first is that I am now gainfully employed, thus reversing the time/money balance that I had when I started it. The second is that it has taken some time to remove a drip.

Regarding the former, I am pleased to report that I am enjoying my new work immensely. It is a happy workplace, and I say that with no irony or sarcasm.

If you are the type that whiles away your hours attending work culture seminars and inventing ever more inclusive code-of-conduct documents or wall-slogans proclaiming company values, you may take offence at my elaboration, which is precisely why you should read on. On one Friday afternoon, not so long ago, my boss decided that it would be a good idea to celebrate another colleague's ethnicity by Walking Like an Egyptian to the song of the same name by the Bangles. Unlike the band, he had not the hair and unexpanded mid-riff, but gave it a decent tilt. I was celebrating my first win (a $50K flood study for a town in regional NSW, thank you very much) with a glass of unsullied Talisker Single Malt at my desk, and asked my Egyptian colleague, as both the object of the boss's exertions and in his capacity of being a leading light in the company's cultural committee, what he thought. His reply, "Go f*** yourselves, I'm off for the weekend", was well received by all, including my boss. Now, I'm sure that the Politically Correct Thought Police would consider this a scenario worthy of its most serious attention but, as I mused into my deliciously aromatic whisky glass whilst pausing between emails, context is everything. In any case, I believe that the Politically Correct Thought Police are probably more worthy recipients of my colleague's admonition than I.

The latter is another episode in the seemingly never-ending saga of my recalcitrant keel.

As readers of this blog might well know, my keel swings on an M20 stainless steel bolt or keel pin. The bolt passes through both sides of the keel box, which sandwich the keel in between. The keel comprises about 210 kg cast steel, and exerts considerable forces on the keel pin, especially when it is levered up into position for retrieving the boat (replacing it) onto its trailer. The keel and pin were up the task, but the holes in the sides of the keel box were not. That was probably because they were simply drilled through the timber keelson beams either side of the keel box, and thirty five years of heavy wobbling had worn the holes into ovals, which then leaked.

I had thought that I only needed to inject copious quantities of Sikaflex (which starts out as a sticky goo, and sets into a rubbery solid) into the bolt-holes to seal them. At the end of my last day-sail, the bucketful of water I bailed out from the bilges proved me wrong. The day sail was, in fact a Sunday afternoon race around Green Island. I started well before everyone else, and finished well after them, but the miracles of handicapping awarded me a bottle of wine for third place, which compensated my mood greatly after mopping out my very soggy bilge.

Having taken sage advice (from an experienced bloke with another old trailer-sailer), I decided on a proper fix for the dripping keel pin bolt-holes. This comprised taking out the keel pin, coring out the timber around the old bolt holes, placing pre-drilled stainless steel plates over the holes, replacing the pin, filling the void with epoxy resin, and sealing it all up again.

The stainless steel plates took a couple of weeks to fix up, mainly because I asked a colleague to cut the sheet and drill the 20mm holes as a favour (i.e. unpaid). The stainless sheet itself came from Bunnings, but I was reluctant to get an expensive 20mm cobalt drill bit to drill the two holes needed in it. Because it was a favour, the plates took over a week to come back to me, but they were properly cut and drilled.

Back to the boat, I found that a 40mm core drill did a good job of getting through the GRP outer layer and removing the timber from the keelsons. Some of the timber came away as black crumbs, which was not a good thing, so I kept removing it until I got to some competent timber. After trying various methods for cleaning out the hole, I found that a small diameter wire brush on my power drill did a good job, especially in removing the black, crumby wood. I did the starboard side first, allowed it to set, and then did the port side second.

I also didn't want to bond the keel pin to the epoxy, because, at some point, I would have to remove it again. I needed a tight fit, and decided on wrapping the bolt with parcel tape, sticky side out, because it was thin and impervious. This proved to be tricky because the length of bolt shaft available for parcel-taping was only marginally wider than my fingers, and because of the tape's penchant for picking up all the loose bits of dirt it could find in the vicinity.

Finally, I drilled two 12mm diameter holes vertically through the keelson beams through which I could pour the epoxy resin.

A quick note on the epoxy resin; though it was viscous, it had no surface tension. In layman's terms this meant that it oozed slowly, but easily worked its way into the tiniest holes and cracks. Though this is a good thing for filling all the voids it could find in the timber keelson beams, it also meant that it oozed through the masking/painter's tape I'd stuck around the steel plates to try to keep the epoxy in the cast. I even got some drips in between the keel box and keel, which I only discovered later in the form of a small puddle atop one of the members of the trailer. My 12mm vertical holes proved their worth in supplying a reservoir that kept the cast topped up as some of the liquid epoxy escaped from the sides and bottom.

After leaving the boat a week, I returned, cleaned up the tape and escapee epoxy and launched the boat. Thankfully, the big drip had been reduced to the tiniest smidgen, which I then fixed up by stuffing the head and nut of the keel pin bolt with liquid Sikaflex before tightening the bolt for one last time, or so I hoped.

I took advantage of the boat being off the trailer by replacing the bunks. The old bunks had come with the trailer, and were cut in a semi circle, but they didn't fit well, which meant that the weight was concentrated on one of the ends. I cut my new bunks to cradle the hull and allow the boat to slip off the back during the launch. Better cradling meant less stress on points of the hull if and when I finally got to transport the trailer sailer some distance by road.

The new bunks were made from one 40*190 treated pine beam, topped off with teflon strips. I got the bunks in place, but decided against drilling the 12mm holes to fix them because the rain and my chorded power drill made for quite a hazardous combination at the open boat yard where I was working.

Austral 20 keel pin renewal, showing new stainless steel plate starboard side. The Sikaflex is just visible as the black goo around the washer

Austral 20 keel pin renewal, showing new stainless steel plate on port side. The Sikaflex is just visible as the black goo around the washer. Also the 12mm filling hole is just visible in the keelson beam vertically above the keelpin bolt.

Austral 20 trailer showing new bunk on port side (front of boat to left)