The dreaded water drip!

[ardoin]

OK, we have all had it happen at one time or another - no matter how dry your boat is eventually there is a leak. What is your worst leak (or most frustrating) that didn't sink the boat?

Mine was in strong thunderstorm with the dodger front window up at night. At 2AM i felt a drop on my head while sleeping in bed - then another drop, then a small stream... I flew out of the bed in full foul language and move to another spot to sleep. In the morning, about 1 gal of h2o was soaking the aft cabin... all from a bad seal on one of the wind instruments that mounted through the combing.

[chris95040]

The gross orange-tinted drips that kept appearing on my clean dishes, and informed me that my deck core was getting wet.

Fixing it was as simple as pulling about 1000 teak fasteners and rebuilding the deck.

[MarkJ]

Last passage the shaft seal started leaking 20 miles from St Martin and stopped 20 mikes before New York.

Geeze i was pissed off. Lolol

[svHyLyte]

Originally Posted by MarkJ

Last passage the shaft seal started leaking 20 miles from St Martin and stopped 20 mikes before New York.

Geeze i was pissed off. Lolol

Blue water vs Brown... The percentage of sediment suspended in the water makes the difference. (When I was a kid we used sawdust, released in the water under the hull near a leaking plank. The sawdust got sucked into the crack between the planks, stuck and expanded. Leak solved!)

[topmast]

Hanging by the stern off a gillnet in a sou'easter the caulking under the engine started to spew inward. Dad used a kitchen knife and my cotton socks to remedy the situation.

[a64pilot]

A little leak from a loose hose on the water heater, just enough to cycle the water pump every couple of minutes, letting you know you had a leak, one that I had almost given up finding and got lucky and saw it.

[Tetepare]

I replaced the heat exchanger in the hot water heater (not as easy job as one might think) and in the process apparently cracked the check valve and now have a drip-per-second leak.

Knowing that the plastic fittings are 25 years old, when I replace the check valve it is without any doubt that something else will break- and leak.

[barnakiel]

We had a leak traveling inside the deck sandwich - water entering presumably somewhere in the bow area and exiting thru a breathing hole about midships ... right into one of the lockers above the salon bunk.

A nightmare as we had huge challenges to understand exactly where the water got into the core and so we had to eliminate the suspects one by one. Quite some job.

(I hope it is 'had' not 'have' as I am just done repairing this).

b.

[hsi88]

I own 2 Catalinas. Enough said !

Lots of leaks fixed in the bow, windows, solar vents, railings, shrouds, stanchions, T-track and instruments. About to fix what should be the last leak from the mast which is producing brown drips. Of course I saved the worst for last.

[Goodall_M1]

I woke up one morning on a charter on a Jaguar 27 in Greece to find one of my trainers floating past my bunk....

Tasted the water and it was fresh, panic level reduced, but where was it coming from?

Pumped it out OK (manual bilge pump in the cockpit), checked that the water tanks were still full, so still no idea.

The next day we were sitting down below when a heavy rain squall came in, and suddenly the companion way steps turned into a waterfall.

Moral of the story check that your cockpit drains are not blocked.
Especially on a day when you have FOUR INCHES of rain in 24 hours.

It had rained so hard that the cockpit had filled up to the top of the companionway steps...

[zeehag]

i had rebedded EVERYTHING topsides before that damned patricia came thru.
nothing leaked. nothing. zip. zilch. nada.
ok.
in patriciacane, EVERYTHING leaked--event the overhead where nothing goes thru it. was a rainy day inside boat. and that was just the first half--


i would love to find the exact places the water was pushed thru the intact wood.

[ardoin]

Great replies.
I just put 2000 miles on my boat and now I have two fixed ports that are dripping. The stress and strain put on the hull in the open ocean is obviously more that I would have predicted. I rewedded two of these ports about 5 years ago and now they have to be done over again. I'm hoping that i did something wrong last time and that rebidding every 5 years in not the normal... (my current rebidding plan is about every 10 years for everything).

[waterman46]

I have no dread of a few drips, but not so happy when racing my old Cal 29, after much excitement after a sail change in very rough seas outside the Golden Gate, we finally sent someone below and he reported sea water 6 inches over the floorboards. Well, I actually had noticed the boat just didn't feel as responsive as normal! Started bailing with a bucket and someone else looking around for a cause of this. After inspecting all through-hulls there was still no clue. Finally someone noticed a great volume of water dropping down from the foredeck onto the V berth.

We simply had forgotten to put the cover on the hawse pipe. Yeah, it was rough out there that day!

[JPA Cate]

Ardoin,

When you re-bed them this time, make sure that you use a bedding compound that stays flexible. Read the characteristics on the tube. Might consider 3M 4000.

Ann

[Hudson Force]

My "dreaded leak" was long thought to be the boot at the deck of my keel-stepped main mast. I had refit and re-sealed this boot many times without success. I often thought it was done well, but a heavier rain or rain at a certain angle always seemed to soak the, now permanent small towel we keep at the headliner around the mast.

Recent inspection during a heavy rain allowed me to spot the drip coming from, not the boot and not the aluminum base plate, but an inner deck lamination. So, it never was the mast boot! One foot forward of the mast there is a hatch and I'm now suspecting something around its perimeter.

....but maybe not. I've replaced this hatch over the 31 years I've had this boat and I've had this same drip for all 31 of these years. Not always! It won't show up with every rain and sometimes it's just a hint of moisture; then, sometimes I can wring water from the small towel.