Near Miss

Week of May 6, 2019

Sunday (May 6), I was in the boatyard for the first day the year that felt like something other than eternal darkness and cold. After removing one of the sparingly few pieces of teak trim from Echo, on the stern gunwale, I decided to pull the cowl vents and clean them. They turned out quite nice. I used a popular, inexpensive Marine Color Restorer, followed by the same company’s Marine High Gloss Polish, which brought the dip-molded PVC cowl vents back to new. (I’m also planning to paint the inside of each cowl vent, maybe green for the starboard vent and red for the port.)

The cowl vents and deck flanges are the only visible parts of Echo’s engine blower system, when viewed from the cockpit. Beneath these vents lurk flanges and hoses that run through a compartment between the transom and cockpit and into the engine compartment.

But it turns out, that’s not all.

While I was cleaning the cowl vents, I decided that I would remove the deck plates and the flanges that seat the cowl vents. The first deck plate-and-flange assembly I decided to remove was on the starboard side. The top of this flange attaches to a cowl vent that faces forward (I call this cowl vent “Tom”), while its bottom attaches to the intake blower hose which leads to the engine compartment.

As I was preparing to remove the starboard deck plate and flange, I felt something give way inside the compartment. I opened the access panel to the compartment, reached in and pulled out the blower hose. Attached to the top of the hose was a triangular flange, with three wood screws, not fastening a thing. Something was obviously missing.

Reaching up to bottom of the gunwale, just underneath the flange and deck plate, I thought I felt something spongy. I squeezed it. It was wet. It felt like a body, but alien. Luckily, it didn’t bite when I squeezed it.

I pulled my hand out of the access panel and began unscrewing the deck plate (which was fused to the flange), anxious to identify whatever it was that these screws attached to, and which had been lurking beneath the gunwale. Thoughts of a baby Champ residing under Echo’s stern gunwale entertained me briefly.

Removing the deck plate and flange took some doing. The deck plate was fused to the gelcoat by age, grime and some white substance that I assume was caulk. I gently slid the edge of a pocket knife between the deck plate and gunwale and pried up a couple of millimeters, only, to avoid damaging the gel coat. I then repeated my gentle prying all around the deck plate until it released completely from the gel coat.

After removing the deck plate, I peered into the hole and saw only darkness. I reached again through the access panel and felt the spongy body. It adhered to the underside of the gunwale even though the screws, running into it from the deck plate, had been removed. I applied a little sideways pressure and it came off in my hand.

I pulled it through the access panel and into the open air, half expecting it to take its first breath. But it wasn’t a living thing. At least not anymore. It was a block of supersaturated mahogany, 1.5" by 6" by 4.5", with a 3.5" hole drilled in the middle to seat the cowl vent flange. It was water-stained and as I’ve already said too many times, spongy.

What, I thought, could be allowing moisture to penetrate the mahogany so thoroughly? Could it be the same issue that mysteriously fills my engine compartment and bilge with water?

Having no answers, I decided to follow Don Draper’s advice: I would think about it deeply, then forget it and eventually, an idea would jump up in my face. But the deep thinking was for the ride home. For now, I might as well remove the deck plate and flange on the port side, which sits under the cowl vent I call Jerry.

I removed Jerry, the flange, deck plate, blower hose and the block of mahogany under the gunwale. To my surprise, I found that Jerry’s mahogany block was dry and structurally sound.

Since by then it was getting close to 3:00 p.m. and I had to drive 1.5 hours to get home, unpack, shower and get ready for dinner with friends at 6:00, I went scrounging inside the saloon for something to cover the big holes in the gunwale, left exposed from the removal of Tom and Jerry and their deck plates and flanges.

Fortunately, I found use for some of my family's mismatched tableware, former residents of our home, but now domiciled in Echo’s galley. I grabbed two mismatched bowls, placed them over the holes where Tom and Jerry once sat, and taped them in place with blue painter's tape. I then closed the access panels in the cockpit stern, leaving the blower hoses inside the compartment, loaded my tools, cleaning supplies and some garbage in my car and headed home.

My plan was to think deeply about the possible causes of water penetration during the drive home and then forget it, expecting an answer to come to me the next day or so.

. . .

Before I begin the next phase of this story, it's important to understand that Echo's power mill is a good old Atomic 4 gasoline engine. And in case I need to explain further, gasoline gives off highly-inflammable (that does not mean “not flammable,” by the way) fumes. The purpose of those now-pretty cowl vents and the flanges and the deck plates and the mahogany blocks and the hoses they attach to, is to ventilate the engine compartment. One hose takes air into the engine compartment from Tom, the starboard cowl vent that faces forward. The other hose removes air and fumes from the engine compartment by pushing it out of Jerry, the port cowl vent that faces aft, so that people in the cockpit don't have to breathe noxious fumes.

I got home, showered, put away some gear and went to dinner (unfortunately, I was too late to catch a pre-dinner ride my friend Dave promised me in his Porsche 911) and later that night, slept terribly. Actually, I didn't sleep at all. And I didn’t know why. By the time my alarm went off at 4:40 a.m., I turned it off and texted a member of my workout diaspora (at least we’re dispersed while our gym owner looks for a new location) to let her know I would miss our morning training for the upcoming Murph workout on Memorial Day.

I rolled over and slept ‘til 8:00 a.m.

On my way to work which is .5 hours south of my house (in the opposite direction of my boat), it happened. An idea jumped up in my face. But it wasn’t about water, the element I had though about on the ride home yesterday. It was the opposite element: fire. I had the crushing, blinding realization – one that, hidden in my subconscious, like that spongy block of mahogany – probably caused my restlessness the night before: I had unwittingly sealed off all ventilation to my highly-inflammable, gasoline-fume emitting, highly-combustible, engine compartment.

Only minutes from then, if it had not already happened, my boat would most likely explode, shooting fiery debris forward, aft and across her beam, and fall out of her cradle onto a neighboring boat, igniting its glossy awl-gripped hull, kiwi-gripped deck and highly-polished bright work, which would then explode and fall out of its cradle onto the next boat, and so on, repeating from boat-to-boat down the line in the boatyard, creating a giant, fiery, and very expensive, domino knock-down.

I switched on Vermont Public Radio and listened for the local news, hoping not to hear about a giant conflagration on the shore of Lake Champlain. But there was no local news. Not because the VPR studios were engulfed in flames, no, but because of the hour. Local news ends at 8:30. It was 9:15. I never get to work before 9:30.

Instead, I heard the BBC. At least the U. K was not reporting on a massive toxic conflagration over Lake Champlain. Or if it was, it wasn’t big enough to make it to the top of the news cycle, which it should have, since, with all the paint, varnish, petroleum products, foam, plastic and poly housed in every classic plastic boat in the boatyard, any fire there would soon become an airborne toxic event (and not the band or the fictitious event from the great post-modern novel, but real airborne toxicity).

So much for the clean air and blue skies of Vermont, I thought.

It's embarrassing enough to have one of the most neglected sailboats in the yard, in addition to the carpentry skills of a lawyer and boat-handling skills of a mountain goat, but to have been so careless and to be insured for a fraction of the damage I either had caused, or would cause, made humiliation, financial ruin and shame an absolute certainty.

I envisioned a future of going from boatyard to boatyard with a cowl vent around my neck, warning deckhands about my foolish and thoughtless mistake. Fire, fire everywhere and all the boats did . . . (you get the picture).

So I pulled to the side of the road, grabbed my phone and composed an email to the office, explaining that I had done something incredibly stupid and dangerous and had to high-tail it up to the boatyard. Before I sent it though, I deleted that part about being stupid (no need to confirm what is already suspected) and promptly drove to the car wash.

Not because I wanted to have the best looking car in the boatyard, but because I had what was surely petrified mud in my wheels owing to a treacherous ride to dinner with friends two weeks earlier, through hill, dale and pit, in the middle of Vermont’s famed mud season. The mud, as it does, dried. More like calcified, really, creating off-balance weights in my wheels, so that when I drove over 50 mph, I risked jarring myself into early-onset cervical spondylosis.

Shaky drives had been fine to and from work, and even that one trip to the boatyard yesterday. But today, I needed to fly. So I sprayed my wheels until the calcified mud lifted and the water ran clear and then jumped in my car and barrelled up the highway north to the boatyard. I said a few prayers to no one in particular.

It was an unusually hot day, which only added to my anxiety. By 10:30, it was 72 degrees Fahrenheit (by way of comparison, as I edit this on May 14th, I do so having awoken to three inches of snow).

When I arrived, I was graced with the sight of my boat and its neighbors exactly as I had left them. I parked my car, took off my watch to avoid creating sparks, climbed a ladder up the transom, removed the bowls to expose the holes in the stern gunwale, climbed into the cockpit and opened the access panels, ventilating the engine compartment.

Gasoline fumes dissipated.

I had narrowly avoided the certain end of my avocation.

I pulled the blower hoses through the access panels, taped them to the aft-most seats in the T-cockpit and used blue painter's tape to create a makeshift hood from the top of the access panel to the top of the hose (working from the hose up, so that water wouldn't get caught in the tape seams and run into the engine compartment). It occurred to me that I could replace the bowls over the holes in the gunwale, since I now had plenty of ventilation from the much-larger open access panels and hoses. I did that, loaded up my ladder and drove two hours south to work.

At the office, I researched how to prevent moisture infiltration from cowl vents and learned about something called a Dorade box, named after Olin Stephen's yacht, Dorade, which first contained these ingenious devices.

Dorade (Dore-AID) boxes, as originally conceived, are rectangular, made of teak, with a hole in the top at one end and a hole in the bottom at the other end. A cowl vent sits on the top hole. The bottom hole communicates with a flange into a hose or a space. Between the holes are baffles seated at the bottom of the box and a few small holes on the bottom edge. Air and water come in through the cowl vent, the water drops into the baffles and flows out the small holes near the bottom of the Dorade box and onto the deck. At the same time, the air passes over the baffles and flows through the hole in the bottom of the box, into the cabin or blower hose. Ingenious.

Teak Dorades are of course, beautiful and to my surprise, are the least expensive Dorades I could find on the internet. But, as far as I could tell, teak Dorades are useful only for venting cabins, lockers, etc. They would not fit on my gunwale, which is cramped already with stanchions, bright work and a flag mount.

There are also plastic versions of the Dorade box, which sit directly beneath the cowl vent and directly over the hole in your deck or gunwale. They are only slightly larger than the bottom of the cowl vent and operate not with baffles, but with floats or other devices, which close the valve temporarily to avoid water infiltration or divert water out the sides.

They are expensive. Over $100 per piece; some are over $200. And in my opinion (taste being subjective), not attractive.

Looks be damned, though, I wanted one; two even. I talked myself into spending over $400 for two. (Ouch!) But I couldn't find a Dorade box that would fit the 4" hole in my gunwale, so I went looking for other solutions.

The solution I found came from Don Casey. Who else? Not from one of his many excellent books on sailboat maintenance, but from a guest blog post I saw somewhere and haven’t been able to find since. It wasn’t exactly advice, but an observation from which advice could be inferred. Cowl vents, as designed, easily take on water. For engine blower configurations, one cowl vent faces forward. This is the intake vent. The other faces aft. This is the exhaust vent. Such a ventilation system on a sailboat, when moored, will take on water through the intake cowl vent, but not through the exhaust.

That’s it.

I had to think about that for a while and then it occurred to me. When a boat is moored, it points to wind. So does my intake cowl vent, Tom, which faces forward. During a rainstorm, where rain and wind are found together like Tom and Jerry (the mouse and cat), the wind blows rain to the stern, which means that it blows the rain into Tom (the cowl vent), where it travels into the flange, saturates the mahogany block, and leaks into the blower hoses and from there, into the engine compartment.

But if you make a habit of turning Tom aft when moored and forward while underway, then Tom shouldn’t take on water while the boat is moored, which ought to keep mahogany blocks, hoses and engine compartments reasonably dry.

If taking on this new, innocuous, and altogether beneficial habit, turns out to solve the problem, then it will also explain why the mahogany block under Jerry was dry and in good shape: Jerry the exhaust cowl vent always faces aft, away from the wind and rain while moored.

At least I think so. It's a reasonable inference, in any (non-airborne toxic) event.

I’m keeping the spongy mahogany block on my desk at work. When it dries, I plan to salvage it with dowels, about one full bottle of Titebond and lots of clamps. Then I’ll coat it in multiple coats of poly, so that it’s more plastic than wood. Then I’ll swap it with the mahogany block (which I’ll also coat with poly) that sits under Jerry. The previously-spongy, soon-to-be-mostly plastic, mahogany block should remain mostly dry, since it will sit under Jerry, the exhaust cowl vent, which always points aft. The block under Tom should also stay dry, as long as I remember to turn it aft when Echo is moored.

And I should save about $400 and a lot of aggravation over mistakes in cutting new blocks and drilling seats for the flanges.

I just have to remember: Tom goes forward underway, but aft when moored.