Question from Non-Member re: Keel/Ballast Problem

I received this email from a guy who wants to buy a Canadian built Cal 28. I read somewhere about someone drilling a hole into their keel only to watch the water run out of it. I thought some of you could provide him with a good answer to the following post: Hello! I am looking to buy a Cal28 (wife loves the room – I have heard good thing) and have been using your website as my resource for a couple of months – wow, thank you for collecting all this info. I finally found one in good shape, in Everett, WA. It is a 1968, Vancouver-built, by Kalgan Marine. Topsides are excellent, but on the haul-out we ran into a weird issue that has the surveyor stymied. I was hoping with your experience you could shed some light on this. Here it is: When we lifted the boat we noticed a "scar" running horizontally all around the middle of the keel, at right about where the top of the internal lead ballast would be – confirmed by sounding with a little hammer. You could "see" the top of the internal ballast from the outside, from what looked like a bad fairing job all along around the keel. So much so that the surveyor first said "are you sure this one doesn't have external ballast? We let the surveyor do his job and went for lunch. An hour later, when the we came back, the hull was all dry, EXCEPT that same area. The "scar" had now become a hairline fracture sort of thing, running along and around the keel again, still wet – in fact moisture was coming out all along it, like a punctured hull blister. That's it. Have you heard or seen such a thing? My theory is that the keel bends a very little bit in either direction when the boat heels and compresses the antifouling paint around that area – so the "crack" goes only as deep as the paint. Unfortunately, the only way to confirm would be to re-lift the boat and with the owner's permission start stripping paint off the keel along the scar, to see what the condition of the glass under it is.. Perhaps your experience can answer this instead? Thank you very much for your time And, regardless, for your excellent website Nicholas Lourotos nlourotos @ neapolis.com [remove spaces] Vancouver, Canada P.S. I found a link to the BC Cal owners group on your site – already emailed them the same question. I will let you know what they say, if the have an interesting answer

Bruce, if simebody wants tu bay Cal 28 I can sell mine. Greeteng Kris Bruce Stirling <br… [at] stirlinglaw.com> wrote: I received this email from a guy who wants to buy a Canadian built Cal 28. I read somewhere about someone drilling a hole into their keel only to watch the water run out of it. I thought some of you could provide him with a good answer to the following post: Hello! I am looking to buy a Cal28 (wife loves the room – I have heard good thing) and have been using your website as my resource for a couple of months – wow, thank you for collecting all this info. I finally found one in good shape, in Everett, WA. It is a 1968, Vancouver-built, by Kalgan Marine. Topsides are excellent, but on the haul-out we ran into a weird issue that has the surveyor stymied. I was hoping with your experience you could shed some light on this. Here it is: When we lifted the boat we noticed a "scar" running horizontally all around the middle of the keel, at right about where the top of the internal lead ballast would be – confirmed by sounding with a little hammer. You could "see" the top of the internal ballast from the outside, from what looked like a bad fairing job all along around the keel. So much so that the surveyor first said "are you sure this one doesn't have external ballast? We let the surveyor do his job and went for lunch. An hour later, when the we came back, the hull was all dry, EXCEPT that same area. The "scar" had now become a hairline fracture sort of thing, running along and around the keel again, still wet – in fact moisture was coming out all along it, like a punctured hull blister. That's it. Have you heard or seen such a thing? My theory is that the keel bends a very little bit in either direction when the boat heels and compresses the antifouling paint around that area – so the "crack" goes only as deep as the paint. Unfortunately, the only way to confirm would be to re-lift the boat and with the owner's permission start stripping paint off the keel along the scar, to see what the condition of the glass under it is.. Perhaps your experience can answer this instead? Thank you very much for your time And, regardless, for your excellent website Nicholas Lourotos nlourotos @ neapolis.com [remove spaces] Vancouver, Canada P.S. I found a link to the BC Cal owners group on your site – already emailed them the same question. I will let you know what they say, if the have an interesting answer

--- In Ca… [at] yahoogroups.com, Krzysiek <krzysztofs501@...> wrote: > > Bruce, > if simebody wants tu bay Cal 28 I can sell mine. I forwarded your email to Nicholas. Thanks, too, Alfred. I zapped him your response, too.