At New Buffalo Marine Services Boat Yard

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 151 - August 29, 2017

This post could have been called Day 11 in New Buffalo, but since we pulled out of the marina this morning and spent the day at the New Buffalo Marine Services boat yard, I decided that was the more appropriate post title. 

We arranged to meet Ed at the City Boat Ramp, and he said we should leave the marina when we saw his truck go over the bridge. We saw him go by, and motored the short distance to the boat ramp up the Galien River. So far, so good. His truck and IMMENSE trailer were at the boat ramp waiting for us, and we pulled up to the dock at one of the lanes.

Then things kind of started going sideways. Ed was not prepared to load a boat with a flat bottom like a C-Dory. His trailer can handle a lot of different sized boats, but it is set up with the assumption that the boat will all have a vee shaped bottom. With a lot of jockeying, blocking on the side rails of the trailer, and a dozen or so efforts to get it centered and properly supported, Daydream was finally loaded. I didn't time it, but it probably took an hour to get Daydream loaded and secured on the trailer. One interesting thing about the trailer is that the way it loads boats - the tires are deflated, the boat is floated over the trailer, and then the tires are re-inflated, raising the trailer under the boat, and the boat out of the water - all controlled from controls at the trailer tongue.

Daydream on trailer

It was a couple of miles to New Buffalo Marine Services boat yard, and Ed and his helpers Billy and Sam started removing the wounded rub rail. They thought that would be easy and quick, but it wasn't. The C-Dory manufacturing process definitely complicated the process, because the original rub rail was put on with a combination of a few screws and mostly rivets. When they pulled the rubber insert, we could see that many heads of the rivets had broken off and were just lying in the channel. To his credit, Ed had found an article on C-Brats. For my C-Brat friends, it was written by Sunbeam, and described her own rub rail replacement, and likewise criticized the way C-Dory had put the rub rails on her C-Dory 22 Cruiser. Ed had also talked again with Greg Little, production manager at C-Dory, who gave him some tips for installing the new rub rail channel.

Ed and the crew thought this job might only take a few hours. Boy, were they wrong!

The first thing the crew did after pulling the rubber insert was to drill off the remaining rivet heads and attempt to remove the few screws. The drilling of the heads went fine, but removal of the screws was painful, as many of the screws were broken or bent. My thought was that we should just leave the rivet bodies in place and caulk over the holes, and put the new rub rail up lining up the pre-drilled holes halfway between where the rivets and screws had been and drill all new holes. We had plenty of rub rail channel, three twelve foot sections, but Ed thought we needed to drive all the rivet bodies though from the outside and re-drill and re-use the existing holes after removing the rivet bodies. Ed is supposedly the expert, and I did not feel I should override his plan for the work, but if he had followed my plan, he would have been done in the early afternoon.

Following Ed's plan, which was the way Sunbeam had done it too, it basically took them most of the day to get the rivet bodies pushed through, and the holes re-drilled to accept stainless bolts on which washers and nylock nuts would be attached on the inside where that was possible, and to use stainless screws where it was not accessible from the inside. They are also using special thin washers that will separate the dissimilar metals of the stainless bolts and screws from the aluminum rub rail channel, which C-Dory had not done. 

They then cleaned the fiberglass below where the old rub rail had been and did a "mock up" fitting of the new railing. This part actually went fairly well, and they had all the pieces measured, cut and in temporarily bolted in place, but they decided to knock off at about 5 p.m., since they did not want to start caulking and permanently attaching the rub rails only to have it get dark before they could finish.

So, Patty and I are spending the night on Daydream in the boat yard. We have electric power at least, so it won't be so much different from being on the boat anywhere else. We can only hope the rest of the work will be finished early enough tomorrow for us to get launched and make it to Portage, Indiana. If not, we will have no choice but to make the crossing directly from New Buffalo to Chicago on Thursday, something we would rather not do. But after watching the work today, we are not hopeful about tomorrow.