We’ve gone deep, deep down into the bowels of the ship. Well, on the inside of a kayak anyway. You have to take a bit of pity on the poor guys who spend their days with their heads jammed inside a hull breathing fumes and bending every which way to seal a seam or a bulkhead. What a job. It reminds me of that bit about knowing what’s in a hot dog.

So yesterday I continued on my self taught kayak repair course. Having successfully. .  eventually. . . mastered removing and replacing seats, repairing fiberglass hulls, and most recently re-attaching cockpit combings I’m now on to removing and re-installing bulkheads!

I attached a clip light to the hull of the kayak and started the painfully manual task of removing an old sealant that had held in the day hatch bulkhead.  This had been part of another temporary repair I had done out of necessity and somewhat in haste.  What was a few drops had become a fully furnished day-hatch aquarium. I’ve found that often a “fix” is not as good as just a complete do-over.

You can actually see some of the black stripe (top picture) that marked where the bulkhead had been attached. Removing the bulkhead was the easy part. I just took a jackknife and cut through the rubbery seal. I cut my finger and bled all over the place in the process. Bleeding was the easy part (in case you missed it) !!

The hard part has been cleaning the old seal from the fiberglass. You can’t use anything with alcohol as it can damage the glass, so you are left (at least according to the guys at the hardware store) with products like goo-gone which is about as effective as spit. In the end it means simply scraping away . . . endlessly.

Today I’ve got a nice clean surface to attach the bulkhead to. I’ve got my tube of 3M 5200 sealant locked and loaded into my caulking gun. .  . Now the real fun starts!

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2. gettin yer groove on. . .
3. back to the ocean tomorrow – CTA
4. Kanoottikompassi
5. Return Of The Son Of Shut Up ‘N Fix Yer Kayak