Another brief from the battlefield

Some days I consider the enormity of the challenge we've undertaken and I wonder how we got ourselves into this pickle. The boat, a 43' Wauquiez, Amphitrite, seems nearly twice the size of our old one and that means twice the problems, twice the expense, twice the work. For the most part, though, I focus on the finished product and the promise of future adventures, new discoveries and memories made with friends and family that we are sure to have aboard this good ship... and then I wonder how we got so lucky. As much work and frustration picking this boat apart and putting her back together may be, it is a labour of love conceived by a dream of living off the hook, and I tell you, it is worth every drop of sweat, blood and tears.
We have been tackling "The Refit" more less project by project, staggering them a bit when we had to wait on weather or supplies being delivered.
While obliterating the hideous rub rail, we also started to remove old port lights and began the installation of a new swim platform. This new addition to the boat was a must. It will make accessing the water from the high decks much easier than just by latter, particularly with dive gear. It is to be raised and secured while underway then lowered for use at anchor.
I drafted a preliminary drawing of the platform based on some blueprints of another Amphitrite, I found online. I did this when we were in Colombia, so taking measurements of our actual boat wasn't an option. I had to make some assumptions about angles and accessibility on the interior to bolt the platform frame through the hull, but the final tweaking could be done on site, once we returned Stateside.

I sent the drawing to a few metal fabricators in the Wilmington area for quotes and passed it along to the Bennett Brothers Yachts manager, Al Nobel, to have him help source out a fabricator. He passed the drawing along to Robert King of King's Marine, who got started right away. Ay ay ay! We didn't know this until we got back here, and I was worried that Robert got carried away with a project that we weren't sure was going to fit our actual boat, but the scaled drawing I made from the found blueprints turned out to be pretty accurate and Robert had no trouble fitting what he had built so far to the shape of the hull.

While we waited for all the platform parts to be done, we began to take on the port lights. We read other Wauquiez owners report on their own port light projects and it seemed pretty straight forward. From the inside: gain access to nuts under decorative window frames. On the outside: remove aluminium frames, screwed into the Lexan window pane. Remove the bolts that hold the pane in place, then release the window from it's place in the hull. Clean up sealant, re-bed, remount and reseal the new window in place. Easy peasy, right?
Right. Well it turned out to be a bit more of a pain in the transom than we anticipated. First we found that very few of the nuts fastened to the bolts were accessible, let alone visible once the plastic covers were removed from around the windows.

 

The boat manufacturer probably assumed these would never have to be replaced and they didn't leave any access around the window to get to the fasteners. Seriously?

Reluctantly, we started to drill out access holes in the teak paneling around the port lights. Some nuts turned out to be easy to loosen, some were fiberglassed right into the hull and some missing altogether. It was frustrating to learn that the builder was so neglectful in how they put these windows together. Patiently, though, we were able to expose all of the fasteners and we could now focus on pulling the assembly apart.

After unscrewing aluminium frames on the exterior we loosened the bolts that held each pane in place, pulled them out and got ready to pry each Lexan windows out of the moulded cut-out they were bedded into. This required that we first loosen the holding grip of the Silicone bedding, which was a very tedious and messy affair. Silicone don't let go so easy, did you know? We used a great product we researched and bought from a producer right here in North Carolina called Re-Mov. We scraped and rubbed the silicone off, layer by layer, until all of its gooey nastiness was gone.

Cleaning and prepping the cutouts for new port lights took close to 2 hours each, and we have 13 of them altogether. First we only did two port lights per day, as we took time to figure out the process and the materials we were working with. But once we got a hang of it things went more smoothly and we were able to remove and replace the last 5 windows in one day. Each pane had to be cut out of a 3/8" sheet of high quality Lexan, which is a more resilient and flexible type of polycarbonate, like Plexi.

One of the new aft cabin windows being fastened to the hull

When we had the rough shape of each window cut out, we routed them using old windows as templates, beveled the interior edge to follow the curvature of the moulded opening they fit into and drilled holes for new stainless steel bolts to go into. Each individual Lexan window was then set in place using double-sided 3M VHB tape, made to withstand adverse weather conditions. Once in place, each port light was bolted through and tightened, then sealed using a UV resistant Sikaflex bedding compound, meant to create a watertight seal between the Lexan window and the hull. Done and done!

Meanwhile, when waiting for sealant to dry or for new Lexan shipment to come in, we focused on getting the swim platform in place.
Mounting it turned out to be less complicated than we thought, which is always a nice surprise and a boost to crew morale. The platform comes in two parts: the brace which fastens to the hull and the swivelled platform, which lower up and down, and because we could separate it, it was easier to mount the brace to the transom on its own and then attach the swivelling platform part to it.

Robert, the metal guy did a great job putting the design together and custom made all bolts and backing plates we needed to finish the installation. Having marked the location for each thru hull bolt, Gabe drilled them out while I cut access panels on the inside where the backing plates would go.

After bedding all surfaces with Sikaflex sealant we fed the robust 1/2" bolts through the holes, through the backing plates, and fastened them in place from the inside. Once the sealant cured we were ready to hang the rest of the platform, complete with 3/4" Starboard planks to form the platform surface. Voila!

Routing a bevel in Starboard edges for a smooth bare foot friendly finish

Drop dead gorgeous drop platform is done!

The Refit

Last night with the Mitú bunch at Barassan

We left Mitú and all we had come to love about it in a typical fashion. Typical to us, that is. Gabe was on the ball about getting all the luggage together, checking out of Los Paisas Hotel, checking in at the airport, thinking strategically about the next few days of travel. I was a slobbering mess. Mumbling tearful goodbyes in broken language to our Colombian and Brazilian friends, spilling a salty river of heartbreak on a dusty airport floor over Princess, Marcela's dog, who had become a dear companion during our stay, sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of leaving the underestimated charm of it all behind and never coming back. It is a distinct possibility that we may not return to Mitú, at least not any time soon, and I was struggling with the realization of it as we filed, single line past security, through metal detectors and out into the sweltering heat of the regional airport runway. The big hearts of our little Mitú community behind terminal windows, waving sadly in our direction, the same hopeful expectations of our next encounter painted on their faces as on ours. Salud amigos!

Nearly two months have gone bye now, during which time we have been hard at work bringing our recently purchased boat out of the oblivion of neglect that she has endured in the last 15 years. After purchasing the boat in July we commissioned Bennett Brothers Yachts to start stripping the epoxy coating and any layers of fibreglass necessary to release moisture trapped in the hull under the water line.

Here she is as we left her in North Carolina. Still bearing the old name Muirgheasa (yeah, exactly), an old Gaelic form of the name Morrissey, which happens to be the previous owner's last name. It is said to signify a brave, skilled seafarer. We like the name al right, but it's not significant to us and we found that no one ever knew how to pronounce it, just by looking at the name, so off it goes. New name TBA

The boat sat for a few months out in the open air with her bottom exposed to the warm breeze of North Carolina autumn, and by the time we arrived it dried out enough for the experts here to start building up the missing layer back up. They slapped on a few good layers of filling compound,  which was faired out to create a smooth, aqua-dynamic surface. This in turn was covered with a three coats of epoxy primer and then painted with two coats of antifouling bottom paint. Sounds simple enough, but it was a weeks long process sanding, slapping on compound, fairing, sanding, slapping on more goop, fairing and sanding again, rolling on epoxy, sanding and finally painting. We are eternally grateful to the BBY boat yard crew for their hard work and their professionalism.

Pip and Tucker putting a coat of epoxy on

While all this was going on Gabe and I started to work on the topsides and deck.
Our challenges were as follows:
1. An obtrusive teak rub rail, which was not original to the boat, now rotting and bringing water into the hull through bad seals and giant rusted wood screws that were used to mount it to the hull.
2. Crazed, leaky port lights.
3. Various leaks through deck fittings and poorly bedded fasteners.
4. A new swim platform.
5. Heavily oxidized hull paint.


1. The Raunchy Rub Rail
Gabe wanted that thing off as soon as he saw it, the first time we came to Wrightsville Beach to view the boat. It stood out like a sore thumb, painted Rust-Oleum green, cutting the elegant lines of the hull in half. I was afraid that pulling it off might damage the surrounding paint, as we noted that the original gelcoat had been painted, up to and around the intrusive rub rail. This meant that while we try to pry the rail off, with all the sealant and epoxy that had been forced into the gaps between the wood and the fibreglass hull, we might chip parts of the "new" paint, that has been laid over the sealed joints between the two materials.

We decided to strip whatever paint was on the rail and see what's hiding underneath. After taping the hull top and bottom, to protect its surface from the paint stripper we applied a generous coat of Citristrip paint stripper on the wood rail. We decided to use Citristrip because it is a gentler formula that is biodegradable and stays wet up to 24 hours, which we used to our advantage by taping plastic sheets to the treated wood and letting the product work overnight. It took up to three applications in some areas and a good deal of scraping and sanding to get what looked like 4 layers of paint off the rail.

Some sections of the rub rail were in good shape, solid. Some not so much. Stripping and scraping more and more of the rail revealed rotted areas that have been epoxied before, by the previous owners, to arrest the rotting and help the wood retain its structural integrity. We researched some products and techniques that would allow us to draw the moisture out of the rot, kill the living spores, seal and build up the damaged wood fibres so that we could salvage the dreadful thing. Yet, as we progressed, we started to discover areas of wet rot and compromised seal that allowed water into and through the hull by the way of rusted wood screws.

After a week of battling gummy paint and dried up caulking we decided to pull the damn thing off altogether.

We drilled out the bungs covering the screw heads that held it tight to the hull then scraped out as much of the sealant from the edges as possible. Next we sprayed the gap between the rub rail  and the hull with a silicone and adhesive remover to try and break the seal between them. After that we began to drive out the 3" wood screws out and watched our formidable opponent, the rub rail, spring away from the hull like it was being repelled by a great force. In our minds, the rail was never meant to be there and the boat expelled it from its body with a sigh of relief that we echoed as we hoisted the dead wood down to the ground.

After cleaning up the area where the rub rail used to be with more adhesive remover we filled the screw holes with epoxy. The strip of exposed gelcoat left behind was indeed different tone than the rest of the hull and we had to find a solution to marry the two shades of white together.

We chose not to try to match the paint colour, but rather paint an accent stripe along the rub rail gap. After fairing the damaged parts with a fairing compound we sanded a 3" strip to prep it for painting with a Platinum Grey a Petit Easypoxy topside paint that ties in nicely with the stainless steel and aluminum elements on the boat. The final result turned out even better than we expected. The stripe adds a nice visual detail to the broad hull surface area without chopping it up in two halves, the way the clunky rub rail did.
While prepping for and painting the new rub rail strip we slopped on a new boot stripe as well. The deep forest green which went so wonderfully with the existing name lettering and the rub rail wasn't our taste so out with the old and in with the new we went, a black and white striping that will go a lot nicer with the colour scheme we have picked out for the boat. More on that later.

Next we tackle port lights...