This boat now has soul

When last I wrote I was still thinking about using the same style hatches I used in the seats in the cockpit sole itself. The main thing they have going for them is that they’re big - easy access.

However, I started to think twice about this. One of the annoyances of the scamp design is that it’s not self bailing. Not really a fault I suppose - most boats this small aren’t. Some people have fit scuppers to help drain the boat of water while under way (indeed the main design calls for them), but from what I could tell:

• the design calling for the scuppers came before the footwell. Now that the footwell is there, that is definitely the lowest part of the boat and where all the water will collect.
• from comments on the forums, the scuppers don’t work well anyway

So my boat won’t have scuppers, and will have no drainage in the cockpit. I expect most of the water to collect in the footwell itself. That said, if I have leaky hatches in the sole, then instead of just having a single low point that I have to pump/bail out, I’ll have water in all three - not great.

I also started to think about storage and what I was going to put where. the bow storage is so voluminous and easy to get to that apparently most people use it heavily (so much so that boat trim sometimes becomes a problem). I will have easy access to below my seats, so provided I keep weight balanced they’ll work well. I realized I may not need much access to the area below the sole. It might be nice for food since I will sail on the cold pacific ocean, but that’s probably it.

So I went back to using armstrong hatches, and I judged what size to use in each case by what would fit my dry bags - most of my dry bags are 10L or smaller and they fit well through a medium size armstrong hatch, so that’s what I went with.

First came the rear part of the sole near the stern.

Then hatch covers in the front portion, one on each side and one for the water tank.

Painting the bilge

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My other boat, Loyal, uses Interlux Bilgekote in the bilge, and it works pretty well. I had to do a repair on Loyal’s transom and needed to reapply some bilgekote, and Mackenzie Devlin, who was helping me with some work at the time, told me to just apply it directly to the epoxied fibreglass. If you look on the instructions for Bilgekote it specifically tells you not to do this, but rather to use primekote first when applying on epoxy, in order to deal with any amine blush. But I only use system three epoxy, which doesn’t generate amine blushes. So what to do?

Well, I’m going to experiment. I applied bilgekote directly without any primer underneath the sole. Underneath the seats I’ll apply the primer first and then bilgekote. I’ll see how they last.

(In reality I don’t really need to apply bilgekote at all - I could just apply another coat of epoxy to ensure the wood is sealed and then leave it be since it’s all under deck and out of the light anyway.)

Below you can see a closeup of the stern most under deck area after two coats of bilgekote (and before I had sanded down the tops of the bulkheads to get to clean wood for gluing the sole down). You can see here that I did not put in the braces for the scuppers but rather continued the side cleats all the way to the transom, and that I was briefly exploring the possibility of putting foam back here for a little more positive floatation (I wound up not doing this).

Cutting out the sole doubler

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Now I need to cut out spaces in the sole doubler for all of the armstrong hatches. By cutting the hatches into the bottom layer of the sole only, the top of the hatch will be relatively flush with the top of the sole doubler, and I can leave a “drainage ditch” around each hatch cover that will allow water to drain to the sides of the cockpit and eventually find it’s way to the footwell.

By giving each hatch a nice gutter, sometimes little “islands” are cut out and left behind. I collected those and glued them back in place.

Last steps before gluing everything down:

• Round over the top edges of the sole doubler with the router to take off the sharp edges
• Drill a few drainage holes in the doubler itself as detailed in the build manual to allow for epoxy squeeze out
• Drill a few alignment holes as well so that the sole and doubler would be aligned post glue up