The first (and hopefully last) leak
August 29, 2026
Water dripping from the bottom of the bow with nothing inside the boat to account for it, which means the source can only be the keel. Trailer, keel, or gift from the sky - the hunt starts here.
- Job no.
- 001
- Logged
- August 29, 2026
- Where
- Hull & Bottom
- Status
- In the Yard
Where it started
The Problem
We were taking AWOOGA to an event in town, out of the water. Whenever I leave the driveway I do a strap test before I pull into the street, and during that check I noticed water dripping from the bow. It wasn't a lot but it shouldn't have been there. Hitched to the truck, the bow sits lower than it does when the trailer is unhitched, so anything loose inside had been given a downhill run to the front of the hull. I had never seen water come off the boat before. The last time she'd been in the water was a few weeks earlier.
The drip traced back to what looked like a single small point at the keel at the bow. That narrows the mechanism: the inside of the keel is packed with foam so there's no large open cavity for water to slosh through — water sitting in there had to have entered somewhere and worked its way out somewhere. When the bow was tipped up, nothing dripped which means the low point at the bow is both the entry and the exit.
Water coming out of the bow is a problem for the obvious reason and for one less obvious one: the bow doesn't have a bilge to put it in.
The idea, before reality got involved
The Plan
The approach is deliberately boring: lowered the bow as low as I could go to facilitate drainage, sand back the keel at the bow and actually look at it, because until the paint is off I'm guessing at where the water is getting in. Inspection drives the rest of the job, not the other way round.
Assuming the inspection agrees with me, the keel tip at the bow gets rebuilt and reshaped with thickened epoxy, then reinforced with fibreglass. The epoxy restores the shape; the glass gives the repair something to hold onto in the one place on the boat most likely to meet a dock, a beach, or a submerged object nobody saw.
The bottom then gets recoated with Durabak, which puts an abrasion-tolerant layer back over the repair. The constraint throughout is that the keel has no bilge to catch anything, so there is no allowance here for a repair that seeps a little and gets pumped out later. It either keeps the water out or it doesn't.
The job, in order
Step by Step
-
1
Inspect
Sanded back a little at the suspect area, and there it is: a small void where the keel attaches to the hull bottom.
Not proof of anything yet, but a void on the joint I'm already suspicious of is a reasonable place to keep digging.
-
2
And here
Another spot where the glass cloth didn't lay flat against the keel — a void under the laminate rather than a bond to it. That's a plausible tract for water to travel along, which puts it on the list.
-
3
Sanded the whole front keel area.
This looks like the source. I sanded back the whole forward keel area to get a clean look at it, and the plan from here is to resculpt that section rather than patch over it. Annoying, but it should be an adequate fix. If I'm going to be flat on my back under the bow anyway, it's going back in stronger than it was before.
There's no active dripping any longer, but I'm leaving it a few days to let out the good humour before I commit to anything.
-
4
Sanding....
Sanded the area out to get it ready for the repair.
The hardware
Parts & Materials
Durabak Black Coating
Durabak
1 quart of black Durabak coating
Fiberglass Cloth
Epoxy
Raka
Thickened with 1/4 fiberglass chopped strand and silica.