lead in the bow.
Rob and all, For what it's worth, of 73 E31's made, my records show that 21 of them had lead in the bow in the same area you describe and my boat was no exception. I was flat out tired of having to scrub grass and Dorado worms off the hull from above the anti-fouling paint. One Saturday I was determined to find out just what was making my bow heavy. I removed every single object in the V-berth including anchors, chain and even the Nylon rode and still the bow was low. I drained the 25 gallon auxiliary fresh water tank and checked to see that the holding tank was empty, still no change. Only after peeking down the sides of the water tank with a flashlight, did I see the faint outline of something glassed over way down there kind of like alien eggs. Out came the tank and plywood platform it sat on with the job put off until Monday when I could call Bruce King to ask him about the ingots. Oh, did I mention that all 21 of our boats that I know of, at one time or another had 500# of lead up there? Bruce told me to "Take the damn things out" given that he had no knowledge of them being there in the first place despite his admitting that he'd overseen the building of virtually every E31. My best guess is that maybe only a single, early owner or possibly several of them might have reported back to the factory that the boats had a tendency to hobby horse or something similar as part of a survey Ericson sent to the first 19 to 15 owners asking for input and improvement suggestions. By the way, the Ericson Independence emerged as a result, beginning with hull #25 and according to the original owner of hull #02, all his suggestions included on his survey were incorporated. That said, every original owner I've interviewed, reported never mentioning the light bow issue to the factory. In any event, I removed all of mine with no ill effect, actually only a positive one, she finally sat properly on her lines for the first time since leaving the factory. The odd thing about the choice of hulls fitted with lead in the bows followed no logical pattern. They started glassing the lead in at hull #19 and the last one was hull #65, some having lead and others not, go figure. Glyn Judson, #E31 hull #55, Marina del Rey CA