S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

When we bought our Pearson 424, we knew right off the bat we had to replace the portlights and the teak eyebrow trim along the outsides of the cabin top. The existing portlights were old and leaked causing the interior teak veneer to delaminate, no structural issues. The plastic windows were also hazed over and they just looked poor. At the 2009 Seattle Boat Show we made the first decision towards the beginning of this big project in that we purchased our new portholes from New Found Metals, located in Port Townsend, WA. Its always nice to be able to support local businesses.

The new portlights are either slightly larger (in case of the 5”x12”) or much larger than the existing portlights so there is some work to enlarge the holes once the existing portlights are removed. Doing all of this prep work is actually really easy using the templates provided by New Found Metals. You clamp the template in place, trace your lines and cut out the new hole. You also use the template to drill all the holes for thru bolting the portlight to the outer trim.

One time consuming piece is handling the bolts. You have to custom cut the bolts that attach the portlight to it’s outer trim. Every hull is a different thickness so they can’t really stock every possible length. I used my handy vise, cut them with the Fein Multimaster, cleaned them up with the dremel and a sanding wheel and then used two bolts to ensure the threads were clean. Here’s a video of that process.

As we’re replacing the portlights, we’re also putting up new wood along the interior teak along the insides of the cabin top. We will match the new headliner to this when we replace that as well. Painting it all white will brighten the boat considerably and visually make the cabin feel a bit taller. We’re using 1/4” plywood, primed on the finished side at the workshop prior to installation. We epoxy the new wood to over the top of the existing wood. That is a pretty involved process of making a paper template, cutting out the new pieces, dry fitting them (which involves a lot of tweaking) then making the cut outs for the portlights and then finally epoxying the new wood in place.

Here are a bunch of photos which roughly chronicle the process. Click thru for larger pics or to see more. They look awesome, the glass is so clean and clear I keep thinking they’re open!

The fresh water system was less that sterile when we bought the boat and we've done a lot of work to raise our water quality. I’ve already talked about replacing all of the plumbing hoses throughout the boat, new faucets, shower, installing a system wide water filter, etc. The last step in all of this is to really clean the tanks.

Pearson 424s have three tanks. 60 Gallons port and starboard under the salon settees and a 50 gallon bow tank. Our bow tank was decommissioned by the P.O. and used as anchor locker. The salon tanks are fiberglass and are structural to the hull, have three internal sections with baffles between each. They are fed by deck fill plates connected to the tanks on the upper foreword end of thanks. There are overflow hoses as well, that I need to go through and ensure they run into the bilge, according to the other P424 owners they were vented into the lockers (lame).

Our port tank has a single 6” aft Beckson deck plate. This is a screw-out plate that is not water or air tight under pressure. The starboard tank has three such plates one in each section of the tank. Eventually, I want to replace all of these with stronger inspection ports and add real gauges so we don’t have to disassemble the settees to look in the inspection port to see if they are full. For now, we’re adding two Seabuilt stainless steel inspection ports to the port tank. I’ll replace the others when there’s not so many other things going on.

The parts have been ordered and I’ll work on getting them installed this coming week\weekend so we can clean the port thank.

Tuesday evening we put Deep Playa back in the water sans rig!! She only spurted a little while I tightened up the stuffing box, which is to be expected since you don’t want to tighten it “too much” and you can’t tell if it’s “too loose” until you’re in the water. The prop shaft is also still not properly adjusted because that also has to be done in the water. So we slowly limped back to our slip and are now tied up at D Dock in beautiful Shilshole Bay Marina. Thanks to CB from s\v Palarran for warping into the slip. Turns out sitting in the yard for 4 months did not make me any better at driving the boat. I’m really looking forward to anchoring more then docking!! :-)

The yard is now getting the spars painted then we can run the wiring conduit, attach the rigging and all the new toys and wiring and then we will have our our masts re-stepped and we’ll look like a sailboat again!

We’re happy to be back in the water, up and down the ladder was getting pretty old.

We’ve been working pretty hard this weekend and got through the following list of things:

• The new prop shaft from The Prop Shop, Ltd is installed !! It’s very shiny. The prop has been dry fit and hand tightened I need a couple of 12” wrenches to tighten it properly. Included in that is a new coupling, new keys and new stuffing box packing. We used 1/4” Tefpack from Western Pacific Trading
• All of the scuppers\cockpit drains (there are 6) now have new 1-1/2” hoses and 316 stainless steel hose clamps. I’ve been working on this slowly ever since we hauled out. These were last replaced in 1999 and the old hose clamps were inferior and rusted. Along with these the galley and head sink drain hoses were replaced as well.
• The diesel fill hose has been removed. I’m having some issues getting the new hose installed and I’m seeking advice on tight fitting hoses on Cruiser’s Forum. This hose was labeled 1980 and was original (yikes).
• All of the seacocks have been lubricated.
• We made some progress on our chainplates. I think were’ about half-way through sanding them all with 100 grit. We only have to sand them about 4 times each with progressively finer and finer grit and then polish them.
• Dawn has started work on the furring strips for the aft berth. She has to take a 1x1 piece of wood and then kerf it so it will bend against the hull. These will be glassed in and used to attach the ash battens. She plans to line the aft berth and the v-berth in this way. It’s going to look gorgeous.

That’s a pretty good list of things… We wanted to work on installing the new T-Track on the port toerail which Dawn prepped previously, but the weather wasn’t dry enough. We’re going to watch our weather windows and just jump on that at our first chance.

I can definitely see a light at the end of the tunnel!!

Dawn and I went to Port Townsend, WA last weekend. We unfortunately did not sail instead we took the land dinghy (Subaru Forester) and all of our standing rigging and chain plates to Port Townsend Rigging to have it inspected and plan for its replacement. Port Townsend Rigging comes highly recommended. In fact, I can’t think of any boat services in Port Townsend that people don’t like. I have not had any work done by PT Rigging in the past and this was my first time meeting them.

I had an email exchange with Lisa to get a ballpark estimate and I had a great phone conversation with her as well. Lisa and Dan were flexible and willing to meet with us on a Saturday which we really appreciated. This would allow them to see what we had and to and allow us to make the go\no-go decision.

Lisa and Dan are the nicest people and easy deal with. They explained everything in lots of detail which if you’ve seen my wiring diagram you know I love! Even better, they took the time to answer questions not just about the standing rigging but some of my other rigging projects. They even did the unthinkable which is recommend where we could save a few bucks by reusing components of our existing rigging or where my other plans were unnecessary and costly (e.g., custom fabrication Vs. off the shelf parts).

Big takeaway from that is they’re hired. They’re going to do all of our standing rigging. Dawn and I are going to sand and polish our chain plates. We’ll have more on that process in a future post.