At the same time as we were repainting the hull we thought we’d get it surveyed, just in case it needed to be over-plated anywhere.  It was pretty clear from looking at her that Ordu’s hull had already been extensively over-plated.  I had gathered from various scraps of information that I’d picked up that Ordu had spent some years partially submerged, so the overplating didn’t surprise me.  When she had been out of the water at Shepperton I could see that there were a great many spots of rust on the hull, but I didn’t know whether these were serious or not.  Once she was on the hard-standing at The Marina we found that most of this rust was superficial and could be removed with a wire brush.  Still, I wanted to be sure.

Before we bought Ordu we had looked at several narrow boats as alternative purchases, including a couple in The Marina.  I was put in touch with a marine surveyor called John Polley by the owner of one of these boats and he had given me very good and comprehensive advice so I asked him to survey Ordu for me.  It helped that we were stripping and painting her hull anyway because John used an ultrasonic sensor to determine the thickness of the hull at any given point, and in order to do this properly he needed to sand down to the bare metal to make good contact.

One thing that you very quickly learn about marinas is that the people in them are never short of opinion (or five), particularly – but not exclusively – when it comes to boats.  Ordu was on the hard standing next to one of the main gates and we were new to The Marina so lots of people stopped to say ‘hello’ and talk to us about her.  I mentioned to one passer-by that John Polley was surveying her in a few days time and was met with a grimace.  This surprised me, so I asked whether there was something wrong with John.  ‘Yes’, I was told, ‘John Polley is really thorough – he checks everything‘.  This was said as though checking everything is bad.  Funny, because I was rather hoping that he would check everything (twice, if possible!) but this approach is apparently not to everyone’s taste.  Ah well, it takes all sorts.

John turned up on a sunny afternoon and spent a couple of hours grinding small areas of paint off Ordu’s hull and offering up his probe (stop sniggering – this is engineering).  He took a good look at her and gave me a quick summary of his findings.  He wasn’t exactly bubbling with enthusiasm in his assessment of her condition (he thought we would get a good ten years out of her yet – I’m hoping for considerably more than that) but he didn’t identify any major issues.  I suspect John is the sort of person who it takes a lot to impress, so I took his relative indifference to the condition of Ordu’s hull as meaning that she was in reasonably good nick.

The most important thing he told us was that she shouldn’t be taken out to sea any more.  Apparently, the overplating on her was sound but was rather like a ‘soap dish’ that had been attached to the original hull from underneath.  We could see that the ‘new’ hull had been welded to the original hull around the top but there was no way of knowing whether it had been fixed to it at any other points.  If we took her out to sea the action of the waves could cause fatigue in the weld between the overplating and the original hull which, in turn, could cause the overplating to fall off!  OK, so no offshore trips in the near future (I’ve since found out that it is possible to fix this by ring-welding the overplating to the hull at various points but since we don’t intend to take her onto open water this won’t be necessary).

Something about JP’s report

John found three areas on Ordu’s hull that needed attention:

• the starboard bow
• the forward part of the keel, also on starboard
• the struts stabilising the propeller shaft in the skeg

The fix to the bow and the prop shaft supports was quite simple, but the fix to the keel required slightly more work.  In order to ensure that welding here didn’t set fire to the hull (by igniting the interior wood lining) I was going to have to take up a section of the deck.  This was a matter of concern to me, partly as I didn’t know exactly how the interior was constructed and partly because it was a terrifying prospect to have to rip open the interior of the boat when I had no experience of doing something like that.  I now realise that there was something else at the back of my mind at this point, and it was the worry that if I started to look ‘under the surface’ I might find more and more things that were wrong with Ordu and which needed fixing.

We found Felix the welder through friends of friends.  He was an absolute godsend, not least because the way he approached the repairs was very straightforward and gave me confidence that he could easily do what needed to be done.  This, in turn, made me feel that I could also do what needed to be done, so I started removing the deck.  I couldn’t take up the whole deck without demolishing most of the interior (which was very bad design on the part of the person who restored Ordu – the deck should always be made in sections that can be easily removed to facilitate situations just like this) but luckily I could take up everything I needed.

The deck was made of strips of tongue-and-groove mahogony screwed directly into a plywood sub-layer (very, very poor design for many reasons all of which will be covered in later posts).  I spent a day removing the screws and carefully labelling and lifting the planks (I labelled them so that I could ensure I put them back where they came from).  It took a day to remove the screws for two reasons.  The first is that the deck had been varnished and most of the screw-heads were clogged up with a thick layer of varnish that I had to remove before I could fit a screwdriver into them.  The second is that many of the screws were extremely difficult to turn and I didn’t want to strip the screw heads.

In the end all of the screws came out, but in hindsight I would have used an impact driver to get them out rather than doing the job ‘by hand’. At the time, however, I didn’t know what an impact driver was and I certainly didn’t have one.  Once I’d removed the floorboards I had to saw through the plywood sub-layer in order to get to the bilge.  The bilge pump is located at the lowest point of the hull as one would expect, but when I lifted the deck I discovered that it was supported by a series of ‘mini’ bulkheads about 50cm apart which didn’t drain into one another.  This meant that bilge pump was successfully draining the engine compartment it was having no effect at all at draining the forward part of the boat – yet another piece of bad design, as each of the under-floor sections that I could see turned out to be full of water!

Once I’d removed the floor Felix could do the work on the keel without risking destroying the boat.  He did a fantastic job.  We painted the new plating and I replaced the deck.  This turned out to be harder than removing it, because I had to fit all of the tongues back into the grooves and screw them down again and it was rather like trying to complete a spring-loaded jigsaw puzzle.  I managed it, though, and we felt good that we had fixed the hull and made her river-worthy.  I had, however, picked up a few new concerns about the design of the interior that would prove to be well founded a couple of years later (that is to say, last year).

Background, Ordu, Painting, Welding