Thanks but that's easier said than done. How do we do it?

I've been googling around for some kind of mini-bilge pump to suck out the last two inches of water, but no luck so far. Maybe I should invent one. :-)

Ok, so I now have a completely dry bilge. I have no weeping (other than my own as I had to do this totally disgusting chore with a sponge and a bucket :-)...seriously, no weeping through the keel bolts.

To keep it dry, I have done two things and plan to do a third:

1. When I had it hauled out, I changed out the stuffing box packing with gore-seal (a dripless goretex stuffing box packing) No drips thus far.

2. For the air conditioner (which ain't pretty but has been working for 3 years, gets the job done and only cost $200 at Home Depot), I simply drain it into a 5-gallon bucket. (See attached pic) This system has been working fine for a few months now.

3. For the water that dribbles down the mast, I plan to drill out the little hole I made next to the mast (middle left of second attached pic) and run a drain line to the upper third of the shower pan (upper part of second attached pic). Then I can just turn on the shower sump to remove the accumulated water.

The combination of the three, I'm hoping will eliminate all water in the bilge and thus save my keel bolts.

After having studied all this I'm trying to imagine why Catalina would use stainless steel in the first place. Why not just use what Collier recommends: silicon bronze?

Any thoughts on #3 BEFORE I drill this hole in the shower pan?

"There's just one thing I want you to do, fellas....talk me out of it!" - The Cowardly Lion :-)

Now why would you want to go and muck up our nice theoretical discussion with such a practical, common-sense question as that? :)

Wow!

I talked with some of the contractors at Playboy Marine in Fort Lauderdale about dropping the keel, when I moved the boat here a few months ago. I thought it was going to be a no-brainer, but they all thought it would be a big deal (spelled $$$$) to drop the keel, so again, easier said than done.

If you loosen the keel bolts, does the keel just fall off? or do you have to crack it loose from whatever glue compound Catalina used to seal it originally? and is that hard or easy to do?

[QUOTE=bstreet;15468]My question would be does anyone know for certain of an instance where the keel bolts corroded and/or failed on a C36?[/QUOTE]

Thanks, everyone. I want to ask Bud's question a slightly different way:

Does anyone know for certain of an instance where the keel bolts corroded and/or failed on a C36 which is NOT smiling and/or weeping into the bilge or down the keel?

Reason I ask is that I'm noticing that thus far, all the Catalinas suffering from keel bolt corrosion are weeping water and gunk down the keel, usually around the "smile".

My boat has no smile, and when I hauled out to move it here from Atlanta, I intentionally filled the bilge with fresh water, and left it there for several days, just to see if any of it would weep out of the keel. That is how we (the yard contractor) and I decided that it was not worth dropping and re-bedding the keel.

Given the difficulty of dropping/re-bedding, and actually doing it all correctly, this seems more like one of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situations, i.e. by trying to fix a problem you don't KNOW that you have, you may spend all that money and time, and in the spending actually CREATE the problem.

So bottom line is that there is nothing practical I can do about the keel bolts BELOW the bilge. The best I can do is keep the bolts IN the bilge clean and dry, and watch for any sign of weeping, and when I dive and check the hull watch for a "weeping smile", so to speak. :)

From my reading of Collier's book, stainless steel corrodes whenever it doesn't get a constant supply of fresh oxygen. Thus when it is closed off with non-moving water on its surface, such as when it is covered in wet plywood or a stagnant bilge, or pools of trapped water down cracks in chainplate caulking, and so on...it corrodes.

That is the primary reason he gives, anyway.

It holds up well, he says, in moving (i.e. oxygenated) water, as long as it is not coated with algae, slime, barnacles, etc. which would trap oxygen-starved water on the surface of the stainless steel.

That may be why my keel bolts have been holding up well, i.e. because there is enough fresh oxygenated water moving into the keel to keep the bolts from corroding.

Hi, everyone.

I spoke with Kent Nelson, the Catalina engineer. He didn't really say I was wrong about the need to use bronze instead of stainless steel below the waterline but he also didn't seem too worried about the stainless steel keel bolts either. He came up with a good idea on it:

Cut a PVC tube large enough to surround each keel bolt and epoxy it or 3M 5200 it around each bolt to keep the water out. If water ever spills over the top and into the small pvc area, just dab it out with a dry cloth.

I went ahead and created my drain into the shower pan instead. Simpler/quicker. Pictures are attached. I simply plugged the second hole in the mast step with a rubber plug, so that all the water that comes down the mast will drain into the shower pan. If I leave the boat for a long time, I will simply take out the rubber plug and accept that the bilge will be wet for that time period.

Up until today when I took the boat out into the bay, the bilge has stayed completely dry. There has been a small drip into the aft section, but I just left a sponge there to sop up that little bit.

Notice the small bit of rust on the keel bolt washers. I wonder if I should be concerned. (As I said, Kent doesn't seem to be...but then it's not his boat. :-)

My new problem is that every time I sail the boat, there is new water in the bilge. I can't trace it yet. My top suspect is full water tanks, since I noticed when I top off the tanks, there is always a bit more water in the back of the bilge. Not enough to wet the bolts, but still significant.

Somehow (how?) I need to figure out if it is salt water or not. I'm too chicken to taste it. :-)

Yes, you are right. I had forgotten about those kits. Good idea.

No, he didn't. I'm thinking that the taller and smaller diameter you make them the tougher it will be to get all the water out of them, if it ever gets in there.

I would make them as wide a diameter as possible and make them tall...but then I'm also thinking about how you would ever retorque the bolts. May be best to use 3m 4000? or another caulk so that you can remove them all if you ever want to retorque?

I bought the seawater test kit today. I discovered there is a separate bilge in the aft part of the aft cabin, for the rudder stock apparently? The test kit shows that it was full of salt water after a sail. The water doesn't leak from the visible part of the rudder stock. There is a little apparently intentional drain hole - actually a large drain triangle formed of fiberglass in the very aft of the cabin. It all looks to be an intentional design. Is it?

The main bilge is now completely dry and has been for several weeks now. At one point, I noticed water in it every time I filled the freshwater tanks. I discovered they were both leaking out the top screw cover, so I added plumbers teflon tape to the threads. That ended the tank leak.

Since I've installed the drain for the mast step into the shower pan, if I can somehow keep the saltwater in the aft rudder stock from overflowing and dribbling into the main keel bilge, I think I can keep the keelbolts completely dry.

There is also a third tiny "bilge" in the far aft about 3 feet forward of the hole in the stern for the manual bilge. The way the stern is angled, rainwater or seawater can pour into the hole, so I plugged it with a wooden plug. I figure if I'm going down I can twist it open with a pair of visegrip pliers so I can use the manual bilge...and hopefully stop the "going down". :-) Anyway, that's just a temp solution. If that stops all water settling into the tiny aft bilge, I'll simply replace the leaking manual bilge hose to stop any drips from it.

Hi, Stu. Yes, that looks right.

I assume that "skag" is the smaller rudder stock bilge I mentioned. Sounds like salt water is not supposed to get in there, but I had the packing gland replaced last summer, and I don't see any water oozing from the metal rings.

I suppose I'll have to open it all up again next time I haul out the boat, and try to figure out where the leak is.

I suspect a " a crack in the molded lower rudder PVC tube to the hull area", since it has a slow, steady drip even when tied motionless to the dock.

I had thought of possibly doing that, but then I thought of two things:

1. If water ever drains down the keel bolt, it's going to become deoxygenated. See Maine Sail's post above regarding the interior wood sections of the keel bolt housings - maybe that's how some Catalina's got their smile in the first place?

2. I would worry about water impregnating any small crack in the fiberglassed wood stringers and dry-rotting them.

To me, it seems best to just keep them dry as Maine Sail says, but granted that is a pain and I don't really think Catalina designed the boats with that in mind.

No easy answer to this one yet.

?? Sounds pretty "structural" to me, Larry. I mean, what happens to that 6000 lb chunk of lead if you just cut them out with a sawz-all?

Ah, I see now, Larry. That's a great relief then! Thanks for posting.

Putting all this together then, since the wood is a non-issue, I think the best recommendation is from Kent Nelson, the engineer at Catalina, who suggested that we simply seal off the keel bolts individually with short sections of PVC pipe, as I described earlier.

One thing you need to be aware of though: Per the Nigel Calder and Everett Collier books mentioned earlier, if you're going to have water in the bilge, you need to make sure that the electric wires are lifted out of it. Contrary to popular belief, these wires are NOT waterproof!...and you can get stray current corrosion if they become waterlogged.

In my boat, many of the wires simply lay in the bottom-center of the hull from the engine forward, and this is a HARD place to get at. This appears to have been done at the factory. Since water dribbles down that bottom-center, there is the potential for stray-current corrosion.

I'm starting to believe that a dry bilge is actually possible. I have my mast step draining into the shower sump, as I described earlier. That's working out well thus far. And once I solve the aft mini-bilge minor leak next time I haulout, that one will be dry. And I have one more in the anchor locker that I think I can solve with a drill and some 3m 4200...

So like Maine Sail, even with my little leaks here and there, with a good, large sponge and a few shop towels once a week or so, I've had a totally dry bilge in the keel bolt area for a month or two now.

See post #19 on a previous page of this forum thread. Just make sure the tube flows slightly downhill to the shower sump.