Re: I'm an owner! 1975 Islander 22
Wow my boat got wet tonight! We had some serious weather come through here tonight. Like hail the size of a quarter hammering the roof of my car while I was driving the kids home tonight. I had the kids holding $2000 Cisco routers over their heads in case the hail came through the roof. I'm gonna have to drive over to visit the boat in the morning to see if it survived. I'm not sure they got hail there, but there's a few old willows near it and old willows don't hold up well in heavy weather. I lived in that house for 7 years and we lost three willows in that time. Fingers crossed. That reminds me, gotta buy a chain saw tomorrow anyway. Gotta tree to cut down so I can back the boat into it's new spot.
ANYHOO...
I actually had to use my new bilge pump tonight to save an egress window in our basement. The gutters were clogged :redface: and spilling over directly above the window well and it was filling up quickly. Water was 8" up the sides of the window and had little waves in it! In the hammering rain, I set down the boat battery, wired up the bilge pump, dropped it into the window well and pointed the hose at the neighbors house. 30 seconds later the well was dry. Did I tell you how cool my new bilge pump is? The kids thought it was awesome. Then we had a little stream of water about 1cm in diameter come popping out of a cinder block wall in the basement - it looked just like in the movies when that first little stream of water comes shooting into a submarine right before the walls cave in. I patched that up with hydraulic cement I had left over from a toilet installation. Get yerself some of this stuff boys, it's coooool. After the stream was sealed up and stopped completely and my family was admiring the glow of my super-hero status, I put the bucket of cement on my shoulder and said to my wife and kids "well, I'm off to the gulf!"
But instead my wife made me put my rain coat back on, go back out, climb the ladder and clean out the gutters. And so it was.
AND NOW FOR THE BOAT RELATED PORTION OF THIS EVENING'S POST:
how many sheets of marine plywood do I need to order to replace the transom wood, floors throughout the boat, cabin bulkheads, helm, side panels and seat tops inside the cabin?
3/4 inch or 1 inch? I'm a big fella so I need a strong floor. Do I need to glass it or does epoxy add enough strength by itself?
If I don't glass it, I'd like to stain the wood then saturate the wood with epoxy to "waterproof" it. But I wonder if the epoxy will stick to stained wood? I have this cool idea where I lay a map of Lake Superior under the epoxy on the "dash board" behind the windshield right in the center above the door.
