Can the old inboard ski boats sink?

[Supra_Comp]

And Freeze!

[suprasam]

Damn! Those pictures make me sick! Wow my stomach turns thinking about taking a wave or just having an old old boat ready to go down.

[Kma4444]

OH GOOD LORD, sunk, and even sunk in the ocean, now that's ugly ugly ugly.

[Ptownkid]

Haha...no, not planning to sink a boat. Just curious as the stringers are starting to go. Engine mount bolts are not 100% tight anymore. They are pretty firm though...just trying to gauge how much to worry in the next month or two.

[Moor]

OUCH! this thread is painful to read. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the frozen boat.....

[Zim]

Haha...no, not planning to sink a boat. Just curious as the stringers are starting to go. Engine mount bolts are not 100% tight anymore. They are pretty firm though...just trying to gauge how much to worry in the next month or two.

You need to replace those stringers asap. Having loose engine counts will put stress on the tranny and everything else in the drivetrain

Sent from my Galaxy S3 using Tapatalk.

[gogger]

Try the longer lag bolt trick and some gitrot. That helped me make it through last year.

[chavez]

can a sunken boat be repaired without replacing the old foam?

[cadunkle]

"Repaired" maybe but the foam is soaked and will never dry out. It must be removed or the boat will always be full of water. Any wood will rot, and fiberglass will crack with freeze/thaw cycles. Composite boats need more or less the same treatment. Sure you can repair without replacing the old soaked foam, but you need to remove it. Personally I'd never put foam back into a boat below the floor.

[SquamInboards]

We once had to rescue a sinking boat that was so rotted, the hull twisted and a sheet of fiberglass split off, then peeled back under the pressure of the oncoming water at speed, leaving a 2' x 2' hole in the hull. This was a sterndrive, but the idea is the same. Really rotten stringers affect the torsional strength of the boat when you hit waves.

Putting boats on stands (two under the transom, blocks under the keel) really gives you a chance to flex the boat and see how much it will twist. New boats don't twist even an inch - not good ones, anyway - but the older they get, the more you can flex them.

Some boats recover fine from a dunking, others, not so much. My father in law had his old wooden boat sink, but it has zero electronics so it actually started and ran the same day it was pulled off the bottom. Yeah, it needed to be refinished because the wood was soaked from the inside and it bubbled the varnish... but it ran fine.