So I discovered that my compression post was rotten at the top, as mentioned in my last post.
I found this out when I removed the teak panelling to check
And found this
and on the other side, this
This is basically the thing that holds the ceiling up – the mast is ‘deck-stepped’, meaning it ends at the deck, then under the cabin roof is a long compression post that goes down to the keel. It’s basically the boats backbone. One of the previous owners had run wires through it, but not sealed the through-deck connection properly (I say ‘sealed’ in the loosest possible term, they’d just chucked a bunch of sealant down the hole with the wires). I am slightly amazed my cabin roof wasn’t sagging more, but there you go.
I took all the teak façade off and yanked it out
This thing is over 6′ and pretty heavy. My boat now looks like this
i.e – gong show.
The next day I found a carpenter to make me a new one. Luckily, it’s fir, so didn’t cost too much. I was seriously considering making my own one, but I don’t really have any woodworking tools. Something to look into.
I got the new post and attached the teak lining to it
Then got it roughly in position
What followed was literally 3 hours of kicking. shoving, swearing and hammering with a mallet until…
Finally!
Last thing to do was attach the last teak plate (with the door attached to it).
Then, to make sure this never happened again, I pulled all the old wiring out through the mast shoe, taped up the bottom of the hole and poured epoxy into it.
I’ll find some other way to run the wires into the cabin, probably via an external through-hull in the cabin roof.
In the end the whole thing was a fairly easy, cheap fix, it just cost me valuable time.
