That Sinking Feeling

Chasing leaks on boats is a time-honored obsession. Rule number one in all galaxies of the nautical universe through all of nautical history has always been the same: keep the water on the outside. When water somehow finds its way inside and you don’t know where it’s coming from, discovering its source so as to staunch the flow becomes a quest for the Holy Grail.

One of my first, my old Alberg 35 yawl. She had a habit, I found, of taking on large amounts of water whenever she was driven hard on the wind with her rail under for days on end. Though was otherwise a very dry boat, I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars trying to find and fix a leak that, in truth, rarely manifested itself and posed no real threat to my safety. After I first recaulked all of the caprail and then rebedded the entire hull-deck joint, the leak did get slower, but it never disappeared entirely.