8 minute read
Tom Cunli e
Tom Cunliffe
The sight of the floorboards of your yacht floating merrily around the saloon is a sure sign that all is not well, as Tom can confirm
Have you ever had ‘that sinking feeling’? Barring one or two lamentable incidents involving small craft I’ve never followed it to its awful conclusion and, God willing, I never shall, but I’ve had some near misses.
One of the more spectacular events was many years ago when I was a gash hand on a 90-ton trading ketch. The vessel was far from new and my shipmates and I had recently ballasted her with iron pigs set under a skim of concrete on the ceiling - or floor - of the hold. The surprisingly shallow bilge ran beneath this ceiling.
It was mid-winter and we were slugging down the Bay of Biscay in storm-force conditions. The running lamps had blown out and my watchmate and I had just avoided a freighter by far too close a margin. We were thanking the stars for our deliverance when the skipper came on deck selling more one-way tickets to Davey Jones’ Locker by courtesy of water rising in the hold.
We hove the ship to and tumbled down the ladder. The mean water level was unsure because she was rolling her rails under while trying to stand on her bow and her transom, but many tons of the saltiest were slopping around with force enough to knock you off your feet. The scene was illuminated by two crazily swinging hurricane lamps and, as
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I clung to the ladder, the ship’s dog came swimming by, its eyes glowing miserably in the lamplight. The hold was filling steadily with bilge water sloshing between planking and ceiling, hitting the deckhead hard then squirting through a wide gap where the top ceiling board would have been if we hadn’t removed it to help the ship breathe. This was now proving a bad idea. Our second mistake had been not to provide some sort of drain-hole in the ballast, because the water that was sinking us was being kept from the bilge and its powerful pumps by the cement.
The mate came wading out of the gloom with pickaxe and sledge hammer.
“We’ll have to smash through the cement to let the water get to the pumps,” he shouted above the roar of the storm.
“What if the pick pierces the bottom planking?” I asked innocently.
“We’ll sink,” he pointed out reasonably. “But if we get smashing, at least we’ve got two chances - small chance and no chance.”
There was no arguing with this, so I grabbed the pick and laid into the job, grateful that somebody had specified more sand than usual in the concrete mix. The surging, oily water kept rising, but we bashed on with a will. The trick was to swing the wrecking tools as the water surged away, then take a breath when it came rushing back again, because trying to drive down through three or four feet was nonproductive. We didn’t know how we were doing because the lamps weren’t much good and in any case we couldn’t see for the water, but just when all seemed lost, we broke through. The outer planking wasn’t breached, the big pumps on the main engine slowly sucked us dry and we lived to pump another day.
The next close call came about after a smaller wooden boat in my care spent the summer presenting her port side to the North American sunshine. One thing you can say about the United States is that the winters might be freezing cold, but the summers make up for it - more extremely than most folks would want. The 50ft boat was black and she soaked up those rays like a lizard on a rock. The seams between the topside planks opened up as the boards dried out and shrank, leaving me with a problem. Either I must face the major task of re-caulking, or I could hope for the best and go to sea, leaving the water to soak back into the structure of the timber and plim her up again. True to form, I went for the cheap option.
It didn’t work. As I sat at the helm cruising down Long Island Sound, the call came from the galley that there was a lot of water sloshing around. I’d heard that before and I was enjoying the sail, so I assumed it was the ‘boy crying wolf’ again and took no action. This boat had a huge bilge and when the cook announced that she was having to stand on the floorboards to keep them from floating away I had to concede that perhaps we had a problem. Leaving the boat to steer herself, I clattered below to confront a very
ABOVE
It turned out that concreting over the bilge of this classic trading ketch wasn’t the best plan
bad scene indeed. Water was pouring in through the topsides and the electric pumps were not coping. As it happened, we were sailing on the starboard tack so the port topsides were immersed. Action number one was immediately to heave to on the other tack and raise the offending seams out of the water. The starboard side had been north-facing on the berth, so it was relatively tight. We started the engine which featured a serious belt-driven pump, waded in with the hand pump too and after what felt like an age we had her more or less dry. With all sails down we motored gingerly into a safe haven on the Connecticut shore and roused out the caulking irons.
There’s no doubt that those of us, including me these days, who sail modern yachts with seamless hulls have it easy in this respect. When a traditionally built wooden yacht starts to make large quantities of water, the possibilities for its source are many and varied. Springing a plank or spewing your caulking are a thing of the past for the majority of sailors, thank God, yet yachts can always find a way of catching us unprepared. A couple of summers back, my wife Roz and I were blamelessly beating out to sea in a wind that chose to rise a lot too rapidly for comfort. Roz was in the galley knocking up some lunch when her priorities changed. As so often in the old days of wooden hulls, she appeared at the companionway to announce that water in the bilge was rising rapidly. My initial reaction was the same as it always had been.
ABOVE
A quick swig of the bilge can determine whether your leak is fresh water from a split tank or something altogether more worrying
BELOW
The definition of a bodge job
TOM CUNLIFFE
Tom has been mate on a merchant ship, run yachts for gentlemen, operated charter boats, delivered, raced and taught. He writes the pilot for the English Channel, a complete set of cruising text books and runs his own internet club for sailors worldwide at tomcunliffe.com I suggested she was exaggerating, but time should have taught me to know better. When she held her ground I hit the autopilot button and scrambled below to take a look. Lifting a bilge board was almost a nostalgic event. It was all our yesterdays revisited. My boat, a Mason 44, has a long keel, encapsulated ballast and a bilge so deep that, lying prone on the cabin sole, you can’t stretch your hand to within a metre of the bottom. The water was already above the lastditch pump. This had float-switched itself on and was performing manfully, but where was the leak? I sampled the water. Salt, so it wasn’t a ruptured tank, but the stern gland was good. It had to be plumbing or a blown skin fitting. Diligent research revealed water pouring out from behind a half-bulkhead where the pipe from one of the lower pumps passes through. I grabbed the pipe and heaved it towards me. The piping now revealed was chafed well through. Some human mistake had clearly ‘repaired’ it in the past by taping over the damage then shoving it out of sight. Inevitably, the tape had finally given up. The pump was now filling the bilge instead of clearing it, while more water from outside gushed in through the hole.
Once again we followed our old tradition of heaving to on the other tack to get the waterline outlet clear of the briny. We shut down the pump and got to work with the other three. The offending pipe was fothered with fresh duct tape and we set course for the nearest chandlery. It took a day to install the new piping. We replaced the syphon breaker for good measure before running an eye over the rest of the plumbing to make sure no further nonsense was lurking. Then, with many a dark thought for the wretch who almost sank us, we poured the drinks and called it a day.
There’s no particular moral to this column except to put the leak on the high side, check the piping even when it’s out of sight, and to ship plenty of pumps. At sea, you never know what tomorrow may bring.
