Very few Seal 28 posters these days!
I thought I'd mention this little problem that cropped up on my 1977 Mk 1 boat, though, in case anyone else is having it too.
Ever since I got the boat 12 years ago (or is it 13?)I have been plagued by annoying little leaks in the saloon. I get drips from the lamps in the deckhead, in a couple of places on the window surrounds and also quite a flood into the port hand cubby-hole over the galley. Not all the time, but usually after bad weather. Some years ago, I re-seated the mast step, so I knew that was all right. This year I set to to fix the problem! I couldn't decide whether the water was leaking in around the handrail fastenings, or through the hatch garage. I sealed around the hatch garage with Sabatack. Very easy to do, but annoyingly it helped but didn't completely cure. Nothing for it but a full coach roof strip-down. The handrails came off easily enough - no signs of leakage though. I started to dismantle the hatch garage. Top comes off by releasing the four screws (in my case, also after chiselling out the Sabatack!) You now see the sliding hatch and the teak keepers that locate it. Lots of screws to get these off, including carefully removing the plugs that conceal the fastenings. Sliding hatch now lifts out and you can unscrew the Tuphnol hatch slides, leaving the whole garage empty. Having done all this and not finding any problem with the construction so far, I noticed that the garage drains, one to port and one to stbd, were short pieces of some strange plastic tube glassed into the GRP deck from the inside or underneath of the deck moulding. The plastic tubes were crumbling away and allowing water to pass from the garage into the boat, instead of out onto the deck. Having replaced the plastic tubes with GRP tubes epoxied into the structure, My cabin is now dry!
It bothered me that the Sabatack around the hatch garage didn't completely stop the drips but it eventually clicked as to how the water was getting into the garage. My drying mooring is in a creek that ebbs to the South. In bad weather, the boat lies to the ebbtide and then dries out with her bow slightly down, stern to the weather. Rain blows in under the spray hood and onto the sliding hatch and then flows forward into the garage QED!
Good times, Seal 28's!
Neil Sinclair
Seal 28/27
'Andiamo of Exe'