Making the boat level in dry dock

[gareth harris]

How level is it possible to make the boat when resting on an Ericson keel? Any suggestions for arranging the blocks? I think it would make installing the interior much easier.

Also, is there any real change in shape in the hull once back in the water, that I should allow for?

Gareth
Freyja E35 #241 1972

 

[Loren Beach]

Depending on how easy it is to adjust the supports, you should be able to get it dead level. If you tie up the travel lift for any real time while doing this, the yard might get a bit testy...

In ye olden days a long piece of clear tubing was used, filled with water, going from one side to the other or from end to end.
Nowadays I imagine that a laser-level red light beam would do the trick.
Ya think?

Loren

 

[NateHanson]

I think water levels would be easiest (one across the beam, one bow-to-stern), but what should you level bow to stern? across the beam it's easy because the boat is symetrical, so you can do the rails, or two lights or something like that. But you can't use the deck to level the bow fore and aft. The easiest thing I can think of would be the cabin sole (assuming there's no step between the salon and the forward cabin). Maybe measure a line six inches above the sole at the front and back of the cabins, and stretch a hose from one end of the boat to the other.

Before hauling fill your hoses so that they're equidistant from your marked line (ie, if one side is 1" too high, the other water level should be 1" too low.) Then when they haul you, just set the boat down so that all 4 water levels end up where they belong. (probably easier said than done!)

Nate

 

[gareth harris]

I still have a good water line, so finding level with a water hose shouldn't be too hard. I am not sure about using a laser since the hull will curve through beam at the water line.
Is leveling the boat as simple as putting more blocks under the forward part of the keel than aft? My understanding is that the stands should not carry too much weight. Having been trucked to the Erie Canal, the boat yard know nothing at all about sailboats.

 

[NateHanson]

You can put more blocks under the front/back of the keel, but also you can adjust the stands without them taking much weight. All the weight will still really be sitting on the keel if it's blocked under the middle. The stands will just position the rest of the boat over the keel.

 

[tenders]

Port and starboard leveling is difficult enough but you can tweak it a little bit with the leverage from the poppits on the jackstands or cradle. The sad fact is that as good as you get it in the beginning of the season, after a few thaws and some settling it's going to be off again after a few weeks.

For me each year the really tough part is fore-and-aft leveling. The bottom edge of my keel ('69 E32) has a very slight downward taper and is hollow in the back two-thirds, so yards are justifiably hesitant to place weight on it. Thus the boat usually kneels forward a few degrees as the weight is placed on the forward part of the keel. This can cause all sorts of drainage problems over the course of the winter.

I have had some luck raising the bow with a bottle jack (Harbor Freight, so I don't worry if it gets wet/salty) and a 4 x 4 timber with an indentation chopped out of it to match the forward part of the keel. As the boat gets lifted, the timber gets put (ie, pounded) in place. I've gotten better at this over the years and I have a couple of choice pieces of timber which allow the boat to rest more-or-less properly at the outset without using the jack.

My boat is on a steel cradle when I do this. It is also possible to lift the cradle up a bit by placing a 2 x 4 under the forwardmost, athwart beam, but this can make the cradle sag a little.

If you have a TravelLift lowering you onto jackstands, make sure you're satisfied with it before the straps come off because I would not not be comfortable doing this on just the stands.

 

[tenders]

Gareth -- where is your boat? I seem to remember from the Sailnet boards that you are a naval aviator. My boat is a VHA/BAQ allowance special from my SWO days on the West Coast, was trucked most of the way cross-country when I got out of the Navy, and in a completely separate adventure appended to my new life in NYC I took it all the way through the Erie Canal and had to be hauled out for a while at the end near Albany.

Good times, sort of.

 

[gareth harris]

I have had some luck raising the bow with a bottle jack (Harbor Freight, so I don't worry if it gets wet/salty) and a 4 x 4 timber with an indentation chopped out of it to match the forward part of the keel. As the boat gets lifted, the timber gets put (ie, pounded) in place. QUOTE]

If you could post a picture, I think it would be worth a thousand words, and exactly what I need, since the E32 and E35 keels look fairly similar.

The yard placed some blocks under the forward and aft ends of my keel, making it level, and therefore the boat point nose down to a huge degree. When they move me out, and I start rebuilding the interior, is when I want to get things level.

My boat is in Brewerton, at the west end of Lake Oneida. After the marina in Pensacola got completely wiped out by Ivan, that was the cheaper of the two places with inside storage I could find (much of my deck was gone, so I had to get out of the weather). Not exactly good times getting there, but hopefully will be better leaving. I am planning on taking the canal to the Hudson, then either up to the St. Lawrence (most likely) or through NYC.

Where did you keep you boat on the west coast, Fiddler's Cove? And where are you now, on the Hudson or LI Sound?

Gareth
Freyja E35 #241 1972

 

[tenders]

Yikes, my sympathies on the storm damage but hats off for your perspicacity in finding indoor storage under what must have been very trying circumstances!

Unfortunately this season I got a new cradle and the boat is tilted level with 2x4s so I don't have a useful picture of the boat on the hard. As for my special piece of timber, I'm not an artist but does this help?

This is supposed to show zoomed-in detail of a 4" x 4" piece of timber about 18 inches long with a depression cut into one edge to allow it to fit up against the keel. Then, zoomed-out, how it gets placed against the solid part of the keel along with smaller pieces of wood so that the weight of the boat is on the solid part of the keel but elevated so the trailing edge of the keel is touching the ground and the boat is approximately level fore-and-aft.

You probably know what a bottle jack is -- a piece of relatively inexpensive hydraulic machinery shaped like a stack of 5-6 cans of tuna with a stubby metal rod coming out the top. It has the ability to lift that rod, and thousands of pounds of stuff you put on top of the rod, a very short distance. More weight than a carjack, but less distance.

I kept my boat at the Chula Vista Marina while I was in SWOS at the amphib base, then at the Long Beach Naval Station marina until it closed (so close to my ship that I could use my cordless phone from the fantail, in the days before cellphones were economical), then back in Chula Vista. I did spend a few weeks at Fiddler's Cove here and there, and hauled out for 8 months for each of two deployments at Land and Sea Marine at the old ITT/Corsair plant, which has probably been put to much more profitable use by now.

My boat is now at the Harlem Yacht Club on City Island, a quirky, interesting, and under-discovered part of the Bronx on Long Island Sound which happens to be halfway between my home in the northern suburbs and my boat partner's home in Manhattan. I kept her at the 79th Street Boat Basin on the western side of Manhattan for several years but don't have much to say about that place except that it was convenient when we both lived in the city. The Sound is great but the Hudson is really lousy sailing south of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The canal is a great trip -- once! If you want the cruising guide I used you're welcome to it. And if you're in the NYC/Westchester neighborhood do drop by, I am certainly good for some grog and my little daughters are perpetually curious about other people who were (or are) in the Navy.

 

[gareth harris]

I think I can picture the arrangement, but for two things:

Where exactly do you lift with the bottle jack?
Why put a piece right at the forward corner of the keel, rather than underneath?

Chula Vista was a nice marina, I went there once by boat for some beer. I am not at all familiar with the waters around New York, as I have only flown over the area. It is hard sometimes, when you are flying, to fathom just how long the same journey would take in a sailboat. But Long Island certainly looks nice, and I can imagine that sailing to the Statue of Liberty and back could get old very quickly.

 

[tenders]

You lift the bow with the jack by placing a timber underneath an area on the centerline, but below the waterline so you are pushing on a piece of the boat which is approximately parallel to the ground, and jacking up the timber. This takes the weight off the forward jackstands and pivots the boat back at the keel.

You put that piece on the forward end of the keel because you want to make sure you're supporting the boat at a solid point of the keel. This is the way I had to do it because my club uses a tidal railway system, not a TravelLift, and there is no way to get unfettered access to the full lower edge of the keel. YMMV.

Sailing to the Statue of Liberty in the Hudson, from anywhere north or east of the Statue, is an exercise in dodging commercial traffic, ferries, shoal water off New Jersey, river flotsam, and worst of all, 4-6 knot CURRENT which is the absolute bane of lower Hudson river sailing. Not so much the navigation of it -- you get used to that part -- but the fact that it can hinder progress both going and coming.

 

[gareth harris]

Thanks, that makes sense now. I will make something similar, but since I will need a travel lift to get outside in the spring, I am thinking of two blocks, one under the centre of the keel, the other, much thicker, under the forward section.

I would really like your book by the way, and will cover whatever you think it is worth plus postage. No particular hurry, as it will be some time yet before Freyja is back in the water.

Gareth
Freyja E35 #241 1972