"Water, water everywhere
but not from places you'd think"
Bastardised from Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner it unfortunately sums up a recent discovery.
Whilst clearing out the bilges there was a fair amount of crud and detritus unsurprisingly. As I approached the port side of hull where it bends up to form the vertical sides I was merrily chipping away at the scale rust when the tip of the slag hammer went ker-Thud - not 'bong' as it had been doing. Tried again. Same result. I worked carefully to see how deep this scale and rot went but then I lost my nerve and thought, this doesn't look great. So I stopped. I came back 5 minutes later to find this...
Yep, that's water. A quick taste test confirmed it was salt water so it was coming through the hull. This is, in general, not good news. I am going to be writing to the surveyors to enquire as to how they missed this chuffing great area of steel rot...
So, don boy scout woggle and start thinking how to sort this. During my many hundreds of hours of reading about barges and various forums, I did read stories of barge captains always keeping bags of cement around so that if they holed the hull they would literally dump bags of cement on top of the hole and this would plug it and set solid. They also use cement underwater as a method of salvaging ships so I thought, it's only a small weeping wound, it's got to work...
Quick trip to Homebase, 2 bags of cement later, a sacrificed floorboard to create an end stop to keep the concrete in place, a bucket, my broken axe handle and time to get to work.
Not the greatest (or safest) conditions to be conducting emergency hull repairs. I seem to be taking on the Golum like qualities of shunning daylight and doing everything by feel...
The two offending areas to be patched...
Concrete done. Not something I expected to be doing but you have to be flexible...
So, I will be firing a missive to the surveyors and demanding an explanation after looking at the photos of the hull I took at the survey in January. I suspect it won't be a huge repair job, but will have to wait and see. My main beef is the fact we paid around €2500 to have a full survey and turns out the hull wasn't as solid as we had thought. If we'd had a bump, that area might have potentially given way. What the insurers would have made of this I dread to think...
Anyway, onwards and upwards, just with a little more caution.
Brownian motion-type musings on barge renovation, life and other bits of flotsam.