Silver lining

It was pissing down most of the day Saturday.

Great! I found all the leaks.

Sunday's thin overcast (warming to a sunny afternoon) dried everything gently. Monday's brilliant sun baked dry (I hope) the cabin top holes.

Sunday was still a moist day. Moist air helps acrylic-based adhesives, like super glue, dry more quickly. (The physics aren't that complicated, but I can see your eyes glazing over already, so just take my word for it.) I cracked open a tube of super glue, getting only a little on my fingers, and oh so carefully drizzled it into the displaced crack in the port side window.

If you carefully watch where the glue goes into the crack, you can see it drawn in by capillary action. If you keep the flow fairly steady, the glue sinks in through most of the depth of the crack, and you get very little spillage down your Lexan pane.

I was fairly pleased with that repair. I only hope it holds.

There were two other leaks (matching ones) where holes drilled through the cabin top had been incompletely repaired, or else the repair had degraded with time.

The stuff formerly used to make the repair looked like silicone caulking. This doesn't seem to bond with plywood, fiberglass, or gel coat, except where it is both useless and inconvenient to do so. Mind you, that might have been the degradation, rather than an inherent property of silicone caulk.

I needed something with an edge, with a point, and with a curved blade. Also something small enough to fit in to a number eight screw hole.

Nail scissors.

See, sometimes it helps to think like a woman.

Me and my nail scissors got every last little shred of silicone out of those holes. Inside the cabin, they were partially obscured by heavy metal plates, so I couldn't just drill through the caulking to clear it out. I dug those little bastards clear.

I got some epoxy putty, although now I'm wondering if I shouldn't have gotten a more expensive version of epoxy instead. Anyway, I mixed it well, rolled it into little pellets, and dropped those little pellets into each hole, pressing each one down as the holes started to fill up. I was wearing those yellow housekeeping gloves, with the gridwork pattern on the fingers. As I capped off each hole and smoothed out the edges, I imprinted the surface with that pattern, which helps to hide the repair on the non-slip-textured cabin top.

Something tells me I should cover the surface with some sort of UV guard. Apart from that one little worry, I'm pretty smug.

There are a couple more leaks, but fixing them correctly would require undoing the mast stays and rebedding the plates they stand on. That's probably not such a big deal, but it's enough to intimidate me for now, so I think I'll save it for later, and deal with the seepage.