Blue Tape Sailing

When we bought Morosaurus (ex. Mordacious) we knew we had some deck work that would need to be completed. She had sat more or less unused for at least two years,  and with most of the fittings not being sealed this had led to rot in the balsa deck core. The most significant and pressing instance of this was just aft of the mast step, where the tension on the rig had started compressing the deck down into the rotten core, and had even cracked the inner fiberglass just aft of the main bulkhead.

Much as we wanted to just get right out and go sailing with the new toy, we forced ourselves to do the right thing and fix this so that we wouldn't make things worse. At the same time we decided to remove, inspect, redrill (with epoxy 'barriers'), and rebed all the basic sailing fixtures, the turning blocks near the mast, the genoa and #3 tracks, and the winches. You'd think that on our third boat we would have learned the danger of the 'while we're at it' approach to boatwork.

Luckily we didn't find any surprises, and in fact were quite happy with the condition of the deck around the other fittings we removed. In a relatively quick turnaround of 2 weeks (during which time our work commitments and general hygiene suffered quite a bit) we finally got Morosaurus out sailing again!

Photo montage time:

Compression of the deck aft of mast.

Under the mast step, cracking of interior skin.

Cutting big holes in the deck.

Rotten core, the mahogany under the mast itself was fine.

Lots of scraping to get the core out, luckily our boatyard neighbors are also Moore 24s, so hopefully they didn't mind finding little pieces of core all over their decks.

While we're at it.

New core epoxied in with epoxy thickened with glass fibers.

All holes drilled oversized and filled to prevent future rot if a fitting leaks.

1 layer mat, 3 layers fabric, topcoat, and then fairing material (shown)

Post fairing round 1 (a bit too much enthusiasm necessitated another go around)

Masked for painting.

First coat, and hardware dry fitting.

Looks a bit like a boat again.

6AM pre-work boatwork

Launched!

The sealant wasn't totally dry, and we were probably shedding bits of blue tape along the way, but we had an awesome first sail.