[quote=Wolfman]Actually after a hard day sailing a gallon is not uncommon. There shouldn't be too many small openings in the hull except a couple of small drill holes, one under the beams and one near the top of the transom if they are anywhere. Common areas that leak are the keels (usually they wear down over time and then a rock strike will cause a hole in one spot), deck lids, rigging tangs that go through the hull and tramp tracks.
If you are consistently getting a gallon or more of water you will probably want to pressure test your hulls. This is actually quite simple and will save you time in the long run trying to isolate leaks. All you need is a pail of water with some dish soap, a garden hose and some duct tape. You take the garden hose, duct tape it to the drain hole and blow on the open end. A couple of lungfulls of air will pressurize the hull. Don't attach a blower, compressor or any other contraption. Those can easily blow out your hulls causing more leaks and damage. Your lungs are more than adequate. Anyway go around the boat blowing on the hose every few seconds and paint or spritz the water on the hulls, start at the keel and work your way up. Mark every place that bubbles so you can fix it later (a sharpie works but is permanent). Now depending on what is causing the leak you have a few options. If the leak is in the hull you probably need to do a bit of glass work, no big deal. Hopefully you don't have a completely worn out keel and it is just a locally worn spot. That is what happened to me. My keel was a bit worn but I had a rock strike the went through at one spot. I took the hull off, flipped it over, tapered the hole with file cleaning it out and using a west system repair pack (and the included instructions) laid 2 layers of fabric and epoxy over the holes. The next day I sanded it a bit to take the sharp edges off re-assembled and sailed the rest of the year. Total time of repair about 2 hours plus the disassemble/reassemble. It wasn't pretty, but no one sees the bottom of the keel, total width was about 2 inches.
If the keel is worn but not through, you can normally get away with putting a wear strip of marine tex 2" wide down the entire hull and that will be good for several years. If you have holes through the fabric you probably need to do a bottom job which required about 2 layers of fabric, 3" and 2" wide, epoxy and a layer of epoxy with colloidal silica to give a tough wear surface. Anyway that is about a days work and hopefully you don't need to do it, but again is fairly simple and easy to do it is just a bit time consuming.
Anyway back to repairing the leaks. From the keel you next need to address any leaks in the sides of the hull, If you have a crease or an old repair that is leaking again you will likely have to cut out the problem area and lay some fabric and epoxy. Chris Hilliard on here has a good tutorial on how to do that in the technical gallery. I'm hoping that given the amount of water it likely isn't this type of problem.
Lastly the most likely culprit and the simplest to fix are the seams and rivets around the decklid, tramp track and rigging tangs. These are the easiest to deal with. Get a tube of marine sealant normally most people use 3M 4200, its a little easier to work with and less permanent than 5200. Use some painters tape to mask off the leaking areas, then caulk away. Smooth it out with a wet fingertip (preferably wearing a latex glove) and let it set. Once it is partially set remove the tape for neat finish. I tend to seal all the through hull bits every couple of years.
Hope this helps.[/quote]
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