……and it springs eternal.  Kinda like the leaks in Sal’s boat.

We did a good job yesterday.  Ground out the Ritz cracker and went about glassing up that pesky little spot.  I wasn’t hoping things would be good.  I was sure that they would.  While I was doing that, Sal was ‘waxing and polishing’ the hull (waxing and polishing is closely associated with cleaning.  They’re like cousins in the obsessive-compulsive world of perfectionists). Things were starting to look good.

“Hey!  Look here.  I have a drip of water here.  How is that possible?”

I took a close look and, sure enough, the hull seemed to be weeping a bit.  I poked it.  It burst into tears.  Not good.

“Looks like we got ourselves some kind of barely visible leak, sweetie.  I am gonna have to grind that area out and see what’s going on.”

“Noooohhhh………..I just waxed there!  Can’t we just let it go, kinda?  I mean, is it really bad or just a little bad?”

I picked up the grinder and took a few passes.  The hull (all of 30 years old) was remarkably thin at that location and it took nothing to cut through.  Under the skin was wet foam.  No question: we had a leak there and it was likely due to a simple manufacturing defect decades ago.  The skin was just too thin.  And so the cha-cha-cha continued.

I confidently assured her that it was a fluke.  “Don’t worry, this sort of thing doesn’t generally happen in Whalers, sweetie.  They are usually very heavily laid up.  This was just an anomaly.”

“Geez”, she said.  “I guess I better tell you about that second little drip, too, then eh?”

On the other side, there was also a little teardrop or two.  And a few extra began to flow from me, too.  Sob.  I ground out that next little weak spot, too.  Wet foam again.  And so a third patch is also now underway. Cha cha cha.

We quit working just after 5:00 pm to the extreme consternation of the dogs.  They are supposed to be fed at 5:00 and, if we are on site and near the kitchen, they don’t tolerate any tardiness lightly. There was a lot of whimpering and leaping about. So, we fed the dogs, had a glass of wine and contemplated our naval…er…navy.

“Good thing you have 15 hp on that boat instead of 10.  At this rate, you’ll need the extra five to compensate for all the extra water you are carrying.”

We calculated that, with the foam occupying most of the space between the double hulls (required on Whaler and oil tanker construction but not BC ferries) Sal’s boat might carry an extra five gallons of water.  50 pounds.  Not good but still functional.  For a while, anyway.

All of this got me thinking………….where do old boats go to die?

Mankind has been building boats for eons.  Why aren’t we up to our knees in old hulks?  Yes, I know a bunch sink.  And the steel ones get cut-up and recycled.  But that still leaves a lot of wood, fibreglass and other types of boats.  Where are they?

We concluded that they are in backyards.

So, the push is on.  We gotta get this puppy back in the water or else it just may expire on the spot.  It makes no sense to have this unfounded fear, I know.  We should have control over these inanimate things.  ‘Specially when they become inanimate, as in ‘d-i-e’.  Right?  But, obviously, we don’t.   Do we?  There is no denying the ubiquity of boats in backyards.

‘They’re like everywhere, man!’

Face it.  Some things are out of our control.  Death, taxes, boats-in-backyards.  It is because of such things that we have to rely so heavily on hope.