GF-18 EMERGENCY!!

[chiel]

My GF-18 is as good as finished but now i have a serious problem!! last night we had a really big rainstorm and the boat filled with with water. While i was pumping the water out of one of the rear storage compartiments (the one with the chase tubing in it) I noticed that the water kept coming in. I then found a small hole in the fillet around the chase tubing where the water was coming from. This means that there was water between the hull and the sole .

The next thing i did was to drill some holes in the bottom to drain the water. To see how much water was in there i drilled small ( 4 mm) holes in every compartment on the starboard side and all of them leaked some water.

Now i know that everyting inside there is covered in epoxy so it can't rot or anything and the water was very clear, BUT , as you can imagine I'm very scared that there is some kind of damage or that it will happen again!!

All help and will be appreciated!!!

[DrBones]

Sounds like you didn't fill the void with floatation foam. If that's the case, here's what I would suggest:

1) Drill holes big enough for a shop vac to fit in (i.e. 2"/5 cm) or so. Drill them there where you will fill floatation foam into the void through the deck! (NOT the bottom!)

2) Attach a shop vac to the hole(s) and use duct tape to hold the hose in place. Then blow air into the void on a dry day and dry out whatever moisture might still be in there. Do that on each hole you have drilled.

3) Finally, fill the void with floatation foam. It's the two part marine floatation foam you can purchase here. Make sure it's the marine foam. You need closed cell foam that doesn't take on water.

4) Plug the holes you drilled with the lids you have left over from the drilling. Use epoxy and fiberglass tape to seal off each hole.

You should be good to go after that. It's "just" another expense...and so it goes...the hole in the water you can't fill with money.

[LarryA]

I don't recall the GF18 having a foamed in area "required" in the plans like the ODs (which have the foamed bottom.

I personally do not believe in fully sealed compartments, even if you get them completely sealed during construction, they often lose their seal as life progresses. Sounds like you were betting on sealed compartments, possibly for bouyancy??

My suggestion would be to open up the compartments that were previously believed to be sealed, fill them with foam as suggested by Dr. Bones and then reseal. But I would leave plugged weep hole at the bottom of the compartments so you can let water out on the occassion that is gets in. A double edge sword. By doing such, you guarantee that water will get in, but you can get it out.

Good Luck with it...

[chiel]

I do have foam under my sole, but not in the 3 aft compartments. Even if water should get under the sole when i'm out on the water the boat will still be unsinkable. The main thing i'm worried about is the chance of something starting to rot in there.

I thinks it's a small chance because off all the epoxy, but nevertheless...

I was thinking the same as DrBones of blowing it out with my compressor on a hot day and and then closing these small drainholes i made.

[jasonmcintosh]

I'm not clear just where the water is.

Is the chase tubing coming out of one of the side storage areas on either side of the motor well? Or is the tubing exiting inside of the rear bench?

Did you put the sole in the rear bench? How about in the rear storage compartments on either side of the motor well?

Then, where isn't it foamed?

If the sole is in the rear bench, and it's not foamed under it, and if that bench is sealed from the area under the main sole, then I'd probably cut out some hatches in the sole in the rear bench. Just live with the fact that those bench areas won't be sealed anymore. Then put some drainage tubes between the bench area and the rear storage area. And put a bilge pump in the rear storage area.

In the long run, I think you'll perfer having the little bit of extra storage space (only 5" high, but...) than the extra boyancy. Since the GF18 isn't an offshore boat, I know that 99% of the time I won't be taking it where I could get into any serious where I'd need the extra boyancy.

Well, that's my two cents w/o knowing much about your situation.


Larry raises a big issue for me. Like you, I sealed under the sole with the expectation that water will be kept out of it and nothing will rot. But I can appreciate Larry's comment that "compartments often lose their seal as they age". Any one have any comments about this? Pro sealing? Pro weep holes?

jason

[chiel]

If you have a look at the picture in the link below you can see which compartments i mean. The chase tubing exits in the most starboard aft storage box as you can see in the picture.

http://gallery.bateau2.com/displayimage.php?pos=-1602

In this area under the sole, most of the water came out. I used a jack to tilt the boat a bit on it's starboard side to let all the water leak out.

The problem now is:

1. How serious is it if some water remains under the sole (rot etc...)

2. How to make sure that it stays out?

Thanks for your replies.

[jasonmcintosh]

I wish I knew how serious of a problem you have on your hands. But I just don't know. How serisous is water/moisture into an area tha's supposed to be sealed guys???

So the sole is in place everywhere but the rear compartments that have the tubes coming out of them?

My knee-jerk response is to cut out the sole in that area and investigate whether the water made it beyond the B frame (I think it's the B frame, don't have my plans with me). If you haven't put the motor A frame in yet, this should be a relatively easy job.

jason

[Boomer]

Dry it out, don't worry about it.

The only real worry you have is delamination and assuming that you used an exterior type plywood AND it was sealed with epoxy, even that's not a risk.
Its not going to rot overnight. There are plywood boats all over the world doing very weel with just a coat of paint.

[Steven]

I'm curious about the "hole" in the filet. Did it not bond well to the PVC tubing, allowing water to get by. I was very concerned about this on my GV11 and made fiberglass tubes so that the bond would be good where they passed through the seat frames.

[jacquesmm]

I'm curious about the "hole" in the filet. Did it not bond well to the PVC tubing, allowing water to get by. I was very concerned about this on my GV11 and made fiberglass tubes so that the bond would be good where they passed through the seat frames.

That is the best way of doing it.
No resin will ever bond perfectly to PVC. It is safer to consider the whole tube as a lost mold and cover it with a layer of tape.