I found the boat on craigslist, a seemingly rare small blue-water sailboat in the middle of the cornfields. This particular specimen, a 1981 Cape Dory 27, had obviously been mid-refit for some time and desperately needed a concerted effort to actually finish the job.
Owned briefly by an intrepid grad-student who found he was lacking time, I found myself relieving him of his financial commitment in exchange for a dream, a gate code, and a truck-load of woodwork, hardware, rigging and every other part of a boat that isn’t the hull.
everything but the kitchen sink, loaded from the previous owners garage.
Everything was stripped off the boat except the engine. Woodwork, hardware, wires, tanks, plumbing. It was as if I’d purchased a bare hull ready for fit out, except I had the interior stored and ready to go. Just fix a few things up and throw it all back together, easy as pie.
The topsides and house top had been sprayed, and the side decks roughly ground down to laminate now covered in over-spay. The bottom looked good though, and my initial soundings of the deck, while incomplete in hindsight, filled me with encouragement. A 2” hole drilled in the keel, and the soft cabin sole suggested it had filled with water at some point, a fact affirmed by the water marks on the interior paneling. A steering quadrant had been optimistically installed on the rudder post.
Closer inspection revealed several vertical stress cracks along the port topsides, on the freshly painted house top and around the cockpit. Several patches of un-sanded filler remained on the topsides as well. Perhaps the paint was more of a sales tactic than a thought-out program. The Cape Dory line was evidently known for its excessively thick gelcoat causing stress cracks, and this boat had apparently suffered particularly from this fact.
It was early September, and I had several months left before I would have to get off the project for winter and retreat to upholstery and the like. I figured if I could get the topsides and deck sorted I would be sitting pretty.
I jumped right in, spending every available moment sanding the paint and primer off the hull. I found a network of stress cracks inadequately repaired and re-emerging. I ground them out more generously and threw some glass in the divots for good measure. Several iterations of filling, fairing, and priming followed. My weather windows narrowing precipitously, I managed to get the hull faired and a few good coats of high build primer on before the snow and temperature fell.
At some point in the fall, I spent a day or two going over the engine, a single cylinder Yanmar YSM-8. I rigging temporary fuel lines and tried and failed to start or even prime the thing by hand, leading me to suspect a bad injection pump. My senses got the better of me though, and I returned later with a battery and re-installed injection pump. The starter and decompression lever turned the engine over much faster than the hand crank, and I soon had diesel coming out of the right places. Finally primed properly, she coughed to life and even pumped water. I ran it several more times, even starting it by hand, with no further trouble, and winterized it happy to have one less thing to worry about.
I hadn’t touched the deck except some sanding to figure out what exactly was going on up there. But as the weather wettened I started to notice a section of the top laminate on the foredeck was particularly thin, and was starting to bulge up a bit, with a worrying squish.
Clearly the boat couldn’t spend another winter exposed with nothing protecting the bare decks, and I couldn’t afford to wrap it and walk away for the winter I was already behind and I had to keep pressing on if I was going sailing next summer.
While ponding my options for winter covers, I retreated to the cabin and found the balsa core in the cabin sole completely rotten, so I cut it out. Maybe I’ll lower it a bit.
Interior with some of the sole cut out
Eventually I decided to build a shed.