Southport Boatyard

It’s been non-stop work since the last post and plenty has happened.
This is being written as we are motoring/sailing between Charleston SC and the Jacksonville FL area so there is plenty of time to kill.
We spent 2 weeks at the boat yard working on several projects to get the boat ready for the trip including painting the hull above the waterline, rebuilding the rudder, fixing as many leaks in the deck that we could find and removing all of the vinyl covered linings used on the overhead (aka ceilings in a house) and ceilings (aka walls in a house). Our good buddy John Hoshaw flew down during this time to help us and we all worked our butts off. We were renting a house on Oak Island about 2 miles from the boat yard and 2 blocks from the beach. We actually quit working at 5:00 one day to go down to the beach and goof off.
My sister Sue who lives about 100 miles north came down several times to help and bring down goodies we had shipped to her house. Sue spent 2 nights at the end of our stay in Southport and was a great help getting things wrapped up. She and her husband Dan stopped on one trip down and picked up a 9.9 horsepower Johnson outboard that we found Craig’s list.
The Outboard is 4 years old but in great shape and comes to life on the first pull. When we go off shore we bring the dinghy up on deck and mount it on the stern rail of the boat. Below is a picture of my Johnson; needless to say I am very proud of it.

The paint job included grinding, filling, sanding, filling, sanding, priming, sanding, priming topped off with 2 layers of white paint. Julie rolled out the paint with a foam roller and then lightly brushed it in 2 different directions to completely eliminate the roller pattern. We had to learn quite a bit about thinning the paint and keeping the brush clean with thinner between applications. We later added a deep blue boot stripe and gold paint in the cove stripe, the results were fabulous.
The rudder rebuild consisted of notching and laying cedar boards vertically between the stainless steel tabs sticking back from the rudder post, We then wetted out a layer of fiberglass with epoxy and temporarily screwed more cedar boards down horizontally. When the epoxy was hard we spent an hour or so with a handheld power planer to taper the cedar sandwich into the shape of a rudder. On top of this went almost ¼” of fiberglass cloth, some fairing compound and primer.
The original overhead and ceiling liners were made of a layer of ¼” mahogany plywood covered with 1/8” open cell foam all topped with the same white vinyl with tiny little holes found in 60’s and 70’s cars. On the overhead every foot or so there was a teak batten going from side to side holding the liner up.
On ceilings (the walls inside of the cabin top) someone covered the liner with a layer of rattan grass wallpaper that was popular in the 70’s or 80’s and trimmed the edges with fancy carved trim that turned out to be plastic coated foam. As lovely as this was, the years of small leaks thru the deck and around windows hatches and ports had unfortunately turned much of the liner into a rotting moldy mass of pulp.
Each batten had 8 screws which had been cover by wooden plugs that had to be painstakingly removed to preserve the batten. Next the liner was pulled out some times as a complete panel sometimes in handfuls as the wood tore. About 20 large contractor bags of the liner was pulled from the boat and dumped.
The next step was to wash the fiberglass behind the liners using a garden hose type fertilizer sprayer set at ¼ cup per gallon with Simple Green cleaner which sat for 10 minutes before scrubbing and rinsing. A mold and mildew killer/preventer was then applied with a small garden type pump sprayer to get into all of the places that couldn’t be reached by hand.
Leaks were fixed by removing the bolts that held hardware down (such as winches and cleats), cleaning the old caulk off and putting new caulk around the hardware and bolts and tightening them down. This is typically a 2 person job, one on the deck and one below to loosen and tighten the bolts.
When the davits ( the large brackets in the back of the boat used to hold the dinghy out of the water) were removed to be recaulked several cracks were found in the deck under the bases which is not a good thing. To repair this about 50 holes were drilled thru the top layer of the deck thru the wood core which was trashed after years of being wet but not thru the bottom layer of fiberglass decking. After some time to let the wood dry out, epoxy was squeegeed into the holes and allowed to cure solidifying the soft core area over a 1 ½ foot square area one each side. The next day 3 layers of fiberglass were applied on the top and bottom of this area to really stiffen it up. The original backing plates that were used were 1/8” aluminum that were bent and twisted when removed. The new backing plates are ¾” African Teak which is incredibly strong and dense, if you put this wood in the water it is so heavy it will sink.
There were numerous other tasks, some major, some minor but finally on October 15th we were ready to be launched. Because of the length of the boat and the rigging for the mast the travel lift was not able pick it up with straps in front of and behind the keel. They had to place one strap in front of the keel and the other on the bottom of the keel which looked scarily unbalanced and put most of the weight of the boat on the rear wheels that were not drive wheels.
The simple task of launching became very interesting when the marine travel lift got stuck in the wet sand around the boat, digging holes as the front tires spun. After 15 minutes of filling in holes and placing boards and timbers under the wheels they finally chained a large backhoe to the travel lift and pulled it onto the concrete launch pad.
This whole episode was quite unnerving. Some of the 4”X6” lumber was snapping like toothpicks if not properly backfilled with sand underneath. The boat was swaying and jerking around in the slings which wouldn’t have been so bad if they had been able to pick it up properly. When we finally got the boat over the slip and dropped it in the water, Charley the owner of the yard said “damn that’s a heavy boat”.
Mentioning Charley makes me think of all of the people at the boat yard. The yard manager, Billy Jack from Louisiana, was always talkative and helpful. He had been a commercial fisherman for 25 years and looked like he was 60, turns out he was younger than me.
Any day of the week there would be 2 to 10 mostly older guys hanging around in the main shop talking about anything from politics to boats and occasionally telling tall tales from their glory days. These locals had apparently known each other for decades and were aloof at first and would only mutter an occasional greeting as we walked by. As work progressed on the boat and they saw what we were doing they became more friendly and would stop by to see what we were doing and ask questions and offer advice.
Some of the guys even talked to Julie after she painted the hull and told her that it was the best boat yard job they had ever seen and that she could get a job at any boat yard painting. During the first 1 ½ weeks they treated her like some sort of parasite that had invaded their guys club.
One weekend Charley fed us lunch, pulled pork on Saturday that he had bought from a fund raiser at the local Moose Hall. He had a 1 gallon jug of barbeque sauce that was absolutely delicious, the label on it was some woman’s name and phone number to call if you wanted more. On Sunday we had baked King Mackerel that he had caught in a fishing tournament on Friday, also amazing stuff.
As we left we decided that if were looking for a change from Corpus Christi, Southport would be on our list of places to hang out, but I think the Caribbean may rank a little higher.
More to come soon