Saturdays have been designated as "boat work day" by the first mate. She stays quite busy but has decided that on Saturday afternoons we will work on our Sal together.
Here she is poking out of the lazarette. Yoga training comes in quite handy on a sailboat- she fit in there quite nicely and helped get the fittings stripped off the decks.
Not too happy to have a photo taken :)
All the fittings and hardware have been removed from the lazarette area. This is the very aft area of the sailboat and looks very barren without anything attached. Its quite an accomplishment getting all hardware removed. There are no less than 84 holes through the deck in this small area.....84! Unfortunately all these holes through the deck led to water leaking into the core of the deck.
Here are the cheesy backing plates that secured all the rear hardware...most of them were so rotted and brittle they could be broken by hand...Just sad.
And this is what rotted core looks like. All that back mush is rotted balsa core.
I cut a very small area just to get started. Boy did I open a can of worms....this Alberg 30 is gonna be getting a new core...pretty much everywhere.
Closer look at the rot.
I cut a little further back....no surprise there.
This is a look at the underside of the top skin of the deck. What is surprising is how much of a fight it was to get off. While all the the core is wet, some of it is not quite rotten.
A wider view of the work area
Still cutting and chasing wet core.
Even though this core is rotten, the deck will not just lift off after being cut...it's really hanging tough. It's going to be hard work removing all the bad material.
As the fiberglass top skin is being pried off it is cracking and separating...I am no fiberglass expert but this deck seems as though it was starved for resin...meaning not enough resin was used when the deck was originally constructed. I am not sure though; perhaps this is normal? If you are reading this and have some experience please feel free to leave a comment below.
All of the core on the port (left) side of the lazarette is saturated as well but the deck is very much still adhered. Prying the top layer has proven quite difficult so far.
I am not at all happy with how wet the decks are but as with everything else, I am not surprised. This area of the deck has always flexed quite a bit when I walked on it. I started back here because the area is small and seems to be in the worst shape.
Stay tuned