Like most sailboats, ours has a few minor leaks. If anyone ever says their boat doesn’t have any leaks, they’re lying. Period.
At the moment, we know at least one hatch and three or four portholes are leaking. With the most likely culprit simply being the need to reseal each and every one.
So about a week ago, Jereme got to work on the hatch in the main cabin. It was leaking from the silicone seal between the glass and the aluminum frame. And we knew we needed to replace the silicone with something better.
For once, this wasn’t a crazy, super time- labor- or cash- intensive project. Yay!
^^hi.^^
We opted for Dow Corning 795 Silicone Sealant — a high strength sealant made for buildings, high rises, that sort of thing. Although it’s not technically designed for marine applications, Dow 795 definitely seemed like the best choice for the job. Here’s the description from Amazon — Dow 795 is a one-part, cold-applied, non-sagging silicone material that cures to a medium modulus silicone rubber upon exposure to atmospheric moisture.
Sounds perfect, right?!
Jereme first had to prep all the surfaces. This means he had to “hand-scrape” every last little morsel of silicone off both the glass and the aluminum frame. (Which by the way is a royal pain in the you-know-what to scrape off.) If you leave any spec of silicone the new sealant will not work properly and we will have just created a new, fresh leak.
Jereme used a bevy of tools to get the scraping job done…a putty knife, his utility knife, a razor blade, screwdriver, etc. etc. etc. Thankfully, Jereme is super patient and extremely thorough and made sure there was not a trace of silicone left on that hatch.
Then, all he needed to do was replace the glass in the frame and seal the space with Dow 795. And leave it to dry. Pretty simple.
We can cross the main cabin overhead hatch leak off our list.
Now on to the others… 🙂