This may be common knowledge to all of you here but I ran into something yesterday that I haven't seen before. When they dropped Brigadoon back in the water after winter storage on the hard, water was coming in!

It had a bad case of seeping seacocks.

All of the intake seacocks on the boat have the normal basket type sea strainers. Most of them were leaking with one of the engine baskets leaking quite a bit. At first I assumed that it was from the top plate where the basket can be removed for cleaning but it wasn't. All of them were seeping/leaking at the actual base or top of the basket portion where the clear plastic outer section joins the bronze bottom/top.

There are four long studs/bolts that hold the assembly together and many of them were now barely finger tight. So the fix was simple - just tighten all the nuts and the leaks stopped.

All the cork gaskets shrunk a bit in the dry and cold environment on the hard as opposed to the boat's normal wintering in the water. My previous boat did not have basket strainers at all so this is the first time I've seen this occur. In talking about it later, the Marina crew foreman that launches/hauls boats says it's normal but it was new to me.

In any case, it wasn't a big deal but it points out it is important to check everything. I could have checked/tightened them while the boat was still dry but it didn't occur to me to do so. Now my dry bilges aren't.

But the bilge pumps worked perfectly!

Wonder when I'll actually know everything there is to know about this (or any) boat?

In any case, at least I know how to use the emoticons!


Oops, I guess I don't. I had 8 icons in the post but the message couldn't be posted because there were "too many images" so I had to drop 4 of them.

Still learning stuff!