Since we are in Charlevoix for 3 nights, we have time to relax, not feel rushed to visit the town and can generally kick back. However, kicking back on a boat doesn’t necessarily have the fruity drink with an umbrella in hand that you might be thinking about. A day off from sailing and exploring means we have time to do boat projects.

Now, if you remember back to our time in Leland, Michigan, we got a fair amount of rain while we were there. We also just put our mast back on the boat this spring when we launched it in Manitowoc. We discovered with the rain that we did a less than stellar job of sealing around the mast when it was put back into the boat. We had lots of water leaking around our mast during the rain storms and we had the time now to address those leaks and get everything sealed up the way it should be.

Our mast is a keel stepped mast. What does that mean you say? It means the mast goes all the way through the cabin top, through the main cabin of the boat and through the floor in the main cabin and rests on the keel of the boat. The other variation, is a deck stepped mast where the mast sits on the top of the deck and doesn’t go through the cabin. So, with the seal around the mast at the deck level not being water tight, the water was dripping down the mast through the cabin and onto the our carpeted main cabin floor.

So, first we took apart the protection around the base of the mast.

That white part covers everything and gets screwed down tight with a large hose clamp and that black rubber part is supposed to get squeezed by the hose clamps to make a tight seal around the mast. When we took the large hose clamps off, #1 the hose clamps seemed too loose and perhaps we didn’t tighten them enough. #2 the black rubber thing was not tight enough to the mast and we could see daylight when looking up from down below.

To ensure a tight seal, we took some butyl tape (this stuff is amazing for lots of things) and fashioned a very thin long snake out of it. Tape seems to be a funny word for this since it’s really the consistency of modeling clay or silly putty and doesn’t really stick to anything but is great for making a water tight seal and is easy to work with and easy to remove should you need to. We put the really long thin snake on the top of the black rubber thing to create a seal at the top so rain could not enter.

We then wrapped the black rubber with a product call mast boot tape. It’s a white tape that sticks to itself but is not adhesive really and it’s very stretchy to stretch it around the whole mast to add to our water tightness. Then we slid the white cover part back down over this and tightened the hose clamps nice and tight to ensure it was clamping everything as it should.

See that gap between the mast and the top of the white cover? Keep tightening so there is no gap for rain to find it’s way into the cabin. Then as a final step we applied another wrap of the mast boot tape around the whole thing. Then it gets covered with a canvas mast boot that I sewed to put around the bottom of the mast a few years ago. Done! Hopefully then next time it rains we will be dry in the cabin.

Next up was to re-install our cockpit table. We removed the cockpit table last summer when we replaced our entire steering pedestal and we haven’t yet gotten around to re-installing the cockpit table. Mostly, we haven’t re-installed it since we were debating how we wanted to mount it and when we have something that is shiny and new on the boat, the last thing you want to do it get out the drill and drill a bunch of holes in it.

Step one – measure, measure and measure.

As you can see, the placement of the brackets are a bit tricky since we are mounting this to a curved surface. Took us quite awhile to find where the center is and the spacing of the brackets and ensuring it’s level, etc. Then we drilled….

We got the top bracket for the table all mounted and then the easy part was the lower bracket since it was on a nice flat surface. Here’s the table in it’s down position and then in the up position. All ready to use!

It wasn’t all work today. I found sometime to inflate our new stand-up paddle board and take it for a spin around the harbor.

The next day was more relaxation, however more of the fruity umbrella drink variety. We spent the afternoon having cocktails on the dock with other boats we met who are from Charlevoix and told us all the stories about Charlevoix and their boating adventures. We made another visit to the town brewery and visited the village cafe for a white fish dinner.