Maintenance Log, 2008

Maintained by Deborah Stern, third owner.

Biweekly: Perkins 4-108 engine, run in gear at 2200 RPM, 15-30 minutes, sailing or not.

Monthly: Bottom cleaning and zinc inspection (and renewal as necessary), by Fastbottoms, Alameda, CA.


March-February -

While in the Caribbean, we got a phone call from Any, who was varnishing Spindrift’s sole. Water was leaking water profusely down the mast and had already soaked a portion of the sole just forward of the mast. Any put a skirt around the mast on deck to stop the leaking, but the damage was done. We called our rigger at Svendsen’s Boat Works to go out and see what the problem was. He later claimed he water tested the mast collar and there was no leaking.

On our return, it took us three weeks and three visits to the boat by the boat yard rigger and manager to finally accept that it leaked profusely. It took another two weeks for them to agree that they had to fix it at their cost – pulling the mast, putting more drain-holes in the mast collar (which was of their own design), and replacing the damaged part of the sole.

When they pulled the mast and cleaned the step, we discovered that the mast step was corroding away. Like most boats built during the 1970s-1980s, the aluminum mast step was bolted down to the fiberglass strut atop the steel beam with stainless steel screws – an invitation for corrosion.

Re-stepping the mast on to the old mast step was not a good idea, so we agreed to put in a custom G10 Epoxy step.

Meanwhile, while the damaged sole and subfloor was up, Deborah cleaned out an enormous amount of degraded aluminum and other material that had collected in the forward bilge area. So much material was in there that water coming from the shower, which we never use, would have barely been able to seep through the 1 ½ inch pipe into the main bilge to be pumped out. As it was, water seeping from the mast during inclement weather soaked up the subfloor before ever seeping into this forward part of the bilge.

Cleaning out this forward bilge area uncovered pipe through which for water is to flow into the main bilge, and also revealed that the shower drain simply was a hole in the floor. We elected not to run a hose from the drain into the main bilge, but if the boat goes cruising, that’s what will have to be done.

Finally, after two weeks in the yard, Deborah went to pick the boat up and on inspection discovered that they rigger had tweaked the housetop badly: both doors to and from the head and shower did not closed and the latches were misaligned. We theorized that the new mast step was an eighth of an inch or so higher than the old degraded one. In order to save time, the riggers had marked the shrouds, forestay, and backstay when they pulled the mast, so they could just tighten them to the marks when they re-stepped it. But now the shrouds and stays were too tight and the boat tweaked.

Of course the yard denied they did anything wrong. We had old man Sven look at it, and he claimed he could see nothing wrong and that when he loosened the rigging nothing moved – in other words, it didn’t tweak back. We got our surveyor to come out and spend two hours going over the boat, and he theorized exactly what we had concluded. While he was there the boat yard manager actually accused Deborah of lying about the doors, implying they’d always been unable to close properly, and without our permission – in fact against our instructions – they shaved the doors to make them close.

The boat is due to come out of the yard in five days, but the boatyard is just not going to own the fact that they fucked up by trying to take the easy course with the rigging.

January - Any Neuvecelles Buckles refinished the sole aft of the mast step.