Tips and Tricks
Now I don't know about you but any boat that can't stay afloat without outside help, and I include an electric bilge pump in that, is a liability. By the way insurance claims show that the majority of boats sink at the dock.
So after getting rid of the 5gal can and moving the battery up forward, I extended the cockpit seat fronts aft to the transom, (which really stiffened up the o/b mount and stopped water getting to the side lockers) and extended the cockpit floor to the transom which gave a flotation tank under the lazarette. The water of course would now run all the way to the transom and I cut a couple of one by two inch holes in the transom (above the waterline) with rubber flaps over the outside.
I then filled in the 2 cockpit drains plus the through-hulls under them and the through-hull for the sink none of which had shutoffs.
The result of all this is that I now have no holes in the bottom of my boat and the rain drains out overboard. The drains are 4 sq inches total with no obstructions so will drain much faster than the 3/4 inch diam drains complete with a foot of pipe. Also a point worth noting is that the fumes from the tank vents also drain overboard because there is nothing in the way. Vapours will not drain through a hole with water at the the bottom. This is the principle behind the s-bend trap in your sink. This means that I don't get a boat full of Gasoline/petrol fumes when I go to it on a hot day.
Remember, Epoxy coated ply is your friend.
When I got my boat 2 1/2 years ago, the after lockers were one big locker with three access points, the two seats and the hatch on the forward face of the lazarette. It had a 6hp Johnson O/B on a bracket that was about a foot and a half long (lots of leverage there) and the previous owner had managed to fit two 6gal outboard tanks into the lazarette (don't ask how he filled them, I had to empty the starboard locker to get them out) and a 5gal fuel can in the port locker.
Added to this was a 100ah deep cycle battery under the foot of the starboard quarter berth, the anchor and a crab trap in the stbd locker and nothing apart from the sails and life jackets up forward and you can imagine that she sat a bit "taildown" even without anybody in the cockpit. The cockpit drains were at the forward end but because of the way the boat sat were at the high end so when it rained the water level reached the bottom of the lazarette opening before it reached the drains and from there could flow round into the port and starboard lockers which fill up.
So effectively after a heavy rainstorm the boat finished at the bulkhead at the foot of the quarter berths and the fuel tanks were underwater. He had to keep going down to it to bail it out.
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