After that, I thought hey, I have some of this JB WaterWeld, I'll stuff some around the old prop shaft. I mean, what's the worst that it could do, just not.. do anything? So I did that. Then I touched up the paint on the port side of the hull that got scraped away before I purchased it. So at this point, it was waiting for my dad to arrive. 11 was near approaching, and he later told me traffic had slowed him down. I stumbled upon the discovery that the ropes I had been kicking around under the cabin table were actually two pre-made halyards with shackles, so we quickly threaded them through in replacement of the old ones. And now, we were ready to go! Or pray. One of the two.
Bernie at Oswego Marina was great to work with. The launch and mast step were pre-paid by the previous owner from the winter storage, so it was just a matter of doing it. He backed the hydraulic trailer expertly, and loaded the boat. I'm used to a travel lift, so this was a new, and slightly nerve wracking experience. But after moving it over to the slings, suddenly she was in the air, and dangling over the water.
Once she settled into the water, Bernie gave us time to jump below and see how she looked. My dad, ever observant, looked down in the cockpit hatch because the stern tube would've been a place I would think I might see leaks. Remember, there's no motor, hasn't been in forever, so who knows what kind of shape that equipment was in. Even with WaterWeld over it, there's no knowing. First thing he saw was what looked like questionable fiberglass, but from everything I could tell it was the old rusted corner of the gas tank that had just made a mess of things. Still dry back there, other than a little water pooled behind the tank, but it wasn't anything coming in, it was just there.
Then we went into the cabin and wouldn't you know it, the next phrase was something like "Well there's water here." Well I hadn't looked there recently, but I was pretty sure I didn't remember any under there last time I looked! He was looking under the port settee and sure enough, about two inches of water pooled underneath. Very clear water, not like it had been dirty from sitting or dripping down the hull. Well then... There are a few thru-hulls on that side of the boat. There's a sink drain, the intake for the head, and two older thru hulls that were likely depth sounders or the like. Underneath the boat, they look like they'd been painted over - inside the hull, one was missing and appeared to have a plug in it's place, and the other had it's wire cut off. After careful wiping with countless towels and such, we realized the plugged one was where it was seeping in. It wouldn't have sunk the boat, but it would've been something to really try to keep up with, and that's just not acceptable.
My first feeling, was.. words I would rather not repeat. I didn't vocalize anything much, but inside I was quite disheartened. When I had my last boat, I replaced thru-hulls all new, and glassed over ones I wouldn't need. These looked visually fine inside and out so I never gave them too much thought. So as thoughts of what to do raced through my heads, my dad suggested maybe we could tighten it? So I grabbed my channel lock pliers and cranked down on the nut holding the plug in. No change. Then he pointed out that he meant on the actual backing nut for the thru-hull. Oh. Duh. Right. I managed to get a lock on it. All in all, it might have had about 1/8 of a turn in it, but it did seem to stop the leak. Or at least slowed it that we couldn't see it actually seeping any more. Phew. We ran to the others and inspected, and all showed dry. So, on that note, it was time to get the boat to the other side of the slips to get the mast raised.
How many of you know about prop walk, and the like? Ok, plenty of hands. The outboard I have on this boat, is a Mercury 9.9 Extra Long Shaft model. Thankfully (even though it's not ideal for many folks) it has tiller controls for gear selection. While this requires that the engine be kept more delicately in tune because there's no revving in neutral, it does give the option to control the progress with one hand on the boat tiller and one on the motor without having to reach for the gear selector. Mind you, this motor had only been run for ten minutes or so at home prior to this. Thankfully it fired right up and settled into a decent idle. So as you can see from the above pictures, we're backwards in the slings. Not knowing how this boat was going to handle - it's twice as heavy as my last boat - I thought it would be best to swing the bow out, and then allow me to drive forward out, up past the regular slips, spin around in the nice wide channel of the Oswego river, and come back into the dockside for raising the mast. And good ol Bernie walks the boat back, and kicks the stern off, assuming I'm going to back it the entire way down (which I had mentioned a few times that I was planning otherwise..).
Let's revisit sailboat steering for a moment. When you get into the upper 20s in feet, or anything without an outboard, the boat is steered with the water disrupted by the angle of the rudder, either moved by tiller or wheel. The water moving over the change in the angle pushes the stern of the boat, causing the turn. Let me emphasize that. Water MOVING over the rudder. You have to be moving, to turn. On smaller boats with an outboard that can be steered, you can turn the outboard to thrust it one way or another whilst starting to move. On a boat with a fixed motor, or in my case an outboard that couldn't be turned, you have to get some water speed up before the boat will react. A 9.9 horsepower motor with a standard prop, I admit, is underpowered for the boat. It will work fine, yes. But it's really a little weak, at least in standard prop form. Once it gets moving, sure it'll keep the boat moving, but the initial thrust is weak. It's weaker when the outboard isn't sitting properly down in the water where it should. And it's even worse in reverse when the natural tendency of an outboard is to rise up due to the thrust, especially so shallow already.
We ended up doing a K-turn in a boat. Basically reverse was going nowhere, so I tried getting movement forward to try to turn the boat. And it became rapidly clear that I was not going to make enough speed to make the turn very quickly, before driving straight onto the rocks that you see in the left side of the photos above. Desperate to avoid running aground, I twisted into reverse. Instead of instantly stopping the boat, it instead just more or less churned the top of the water in frustration, but had the added unintended effect of giving me a sharp prop-walk reaction to port. Happily, this was exactly where I wanted to go. So in doing that, it gave me enough room to forward, and eventually get going the proper direction. And sure enough, once we got out and I could speed up, the extra speed made it easy to just spin right back around and come in to the dockside, to tie up for the mast.
The mast raising went without incident, if you discount that I almost forgot to tighten the masthead bolts back in from my sheave divider install. We got the mast up, and Bernie gave us the ok to leave the boat tied up while we ran one of the cars to Fair Point Marina where we would end up, so that we would have way to come back and get the other car. We got to Fair Point easily, and stopped for some Friendly's on the way back. Arriving back to the boat a little before four, we had one more thing to sort out. One of the halyards was through a spreader so I tied a wrench to a thin line I had, and after about two dozen attempts, got the throw right and straightened it out. Now, we were faced with once again being pointed in the wrong direction. More than that, the wind had started picking up a bit and the clouds were coming in which cooled the day down a little. But, on the plus side, the wind was coming from the Southwest, so I had the genius idea of just releasing the stern, letting the wind and waves carry the stern out and around, and use the bow as a pivot until we were turned around. Which worked great in my head, but in practice, my dad cast off the bow a little early and.. we needed another 97 point turn to get out. Well, not really, but we did have to thrust reverse to curve a little, and then trying to get enough speed, we needed every inch of the working space to get that sucker to turn 180 degrees. But, after all that, we were finally pointed in the right direction. And if only that had been the hardest part.
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