Boat took on water - enough to wet the carpet behind the driver...

[rludtke]

I took today off from work to try and fix the boat for the week end.

In order to remove my rudder, I had to shift my boat over to the left side of my trailer, as there is trailer prop cage structure on the centerline that prevented the rudder from dropping free. While under the boat, I noticed droplets forming beneath the boat about 3/4" forward of the stern, directly under the exhaust pipe outlet, in an area of the boat normally covered by the righthand trailer bunk. Wiping the droplets, I could see a brown colored crack, about 3" long, parallelling the transom. The water drops would return quickly, so to explore further, I removed the righthand Super Trapp and its attach flange. Water started running from the lower screws as soon as I removed them, and sped up as I removed the flange and sealant. Most of the sealant pulled off smoothly and cleanly from the boat, indicating a faulty seal.

To help the water drain, I drilled the lowest screw hole up to 3/8" in size, and a considerable amount of water drained out. I am allowing it to dry out now.

I am planning to fill all of the Supertrapp screw holes in the transom with cabosil, do a fiberglass surface repair of the crack, and remount and reseal the Supertrapp and exhuast.

I took a good look at the structure at the stern area. There are no limbers cut through the main stringers anywhere, including at the transom intersection. This would suggest that the boat has three seprate chambers under the floor. Left, Right, and Center. I saw water above the floor on the right side only, near the gunnel. The bilge (Center chamber) was aproximently 3/4 full at that time. If my right hand side exhaust allowed water to leak into the Right hand chamber, which it may have, I don't understand how that caused the bilge to fill. I would like all of the water from the three chambers to drain to the bilge, but I can not find the water path in my boat to allow water to do so. I suspect that I had water trapped in the Right hand chamber of the boat. If I had never moved the boat to the side of the trailer, I may never had noticed.

But, this may not completely solve my problem, as it doesn't make sense to me why the bilge was so full. I must still have a seperate leak in the Center chamber?

I will accomplish the repair, and re-assemble the rudder, then take the boat to the lake to do some testing.

Can anyone with first hand experience with the stringer replacement of a 1987 Comp describe the stringer design and the factory intended water path to the bilge? It does not look to me like the designers ever thought water would enter the left or right chambers, and so they did not provide measures to allow it to drain.

I don't understand the failure mode for this crack either. I suspect it has been there a while. I do not see anything like it on the left side.