Better to have discovered a hole in the bottom of your boat before you launch. That’s what I told myself after calming down.
I spent part of Sunday getting reacquainted with Cerberus, my 1979 Cape Dory sloop. It had been in the boatyard high and dry in a Connecticut marina for more than a year, having been slated for an engine replacement. I had done some of the work myself, taking the original Volvo Penta hunk of iron out and lifting the shiny red new one aboard. The rest I left to the yard in the interest of time, thinking all would be well.
Mike (not his real name), the guy who was supposed to complete the installation, was no longer working there when I called toward the end of the winter to check on the progress. I spoke to him on the cell a few days later; he was tied up freelancing on other boats, it would take a few weeks for him to get to it, he wanted $100 for gas and time to meet at the boat to discuss things, and I needed a new propeller shaft, anyway. This did not give me the warm fuzzies.
When I got to the boat about a week later, it was as if the dude had just then stepped away for a smoke (maybe he had). The prop shaft and prop were sitting outside on a piece of plywood. A ladder stood at the starboard side with an extension cord snaking up it. Inside was a scatter of stainless steel machine bolts and engine parts. A vacuum cleaner, not mine, sat on the floorboards.
One of the signs of a hack job is a stack of washers. And washers I found in abundance. Mike had apparently started work with the engine resting in the wrong spot and, rather than stop and then begin again properly, had instead stuffed a few pieces of aluminum beneath it. The aft engine feet pointed in a wrong direction, one only half-sitting on his aluminum mounting plate — that’s where the washers came in. I sat for a while. There was no avoiding it: The engine had to come out. That’s when I found the hole. Mike had drilled through the aluminum bar and then through the one-inch-thick curve of the hull into daylight.
What was frightening was that he had done nothing to repair the damage, nor told me about it. Had the boat been put in the water, the flood would have overwhelmed the battery-powered bilge pump. Bad.
Now I realize that there is nothing else to be done if I want to salvage the season. I’ll have to get on it myself, which had been my plan in the first place.
Boats. If they don’t kill you, they make you stronger.