The Westlake Pirates

First step - reenforcing the remaining soft wood. For that task, I first used a commercial wood stabilizer (made with Methyl Ethyl Ketone and a few other mineral spirits), which dried to a translucent white finish and got me a bit high from the fumes at the same time. When that was done, I used a bit of Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty, which after a few mixing adventures (they say to use it at 5:1 with water, but good luck measuring that!), lived up to its name and did a spectacular job filling in the gaps and voids to leave solid surfaces for screws and nails to bite into.

There's some of the putty after drying for a day.

Some more patch-work in the bottom corner.

There's the area that took the worst of the water, all patched up and with one new nailing strip placed and ready to screw in.

An overview of the repairs, just before placing the plywood.

After placing a few nailer strips to provide more bite for wood screws, I set the plywood in place. It fit nicely, which is good, seeing as I had just measured and cut it not a day earlier! It took a bit of balance and fast hands with the power drill to get some screws in and support it, but once it was up, most of the screws went in and set tightly, so I feel confident that it's going to hold nicely. Once it was in place, I noticed one small issue - the new wood protrudes just a little bit further than the old wood did (about 1/16", if not less), so the side panel sticks out slightly relative to the top panel. This shouldn't be an issue once the metal flashing is reinstalled and filled with caulk, but it was a bit of an annoyance.

The next step was to re-attach the fiberglass panel to the plywood. First I had to re-glass a small chunk that had been cracked when I originally removed the panel. This was fairly straightforward and fast, but until it gets sanded down and polished a bit, it looks rather ugly. Then I ran into a slightly larger problem - the epoxy I purchased to adhere the fiberglass panel to the plywood was way too viscous and set far too rapidly to be useful for the size of the area I was working with (the plywood, for reference, was about 3' x 4'.) Luckily, I had a tube of fast-set 3M 5200 adhesive sealant, with a setting time of 1 hour and a cure time of 1 day, so I cracked that open and got to work applying that to the wood. That stuff extrudes from the can REALLY slowly and gets everywhere, but for adhesive properties, it's tough to beat. That applied fairly uniformly, I slid the panel on and shoved it against the plywood, with some shims for support. This is when I ran into another unexpected issue - even with a setting time of an hour, there's still a rather long period of time where it has play, so I had to keep pushing against the panel to keep it from sliding down and coming apart from the plywood. I can only imagine how pitiful I looked to anyone who happened to be walking by, as I kept leaning against a seemingly immobile wall. After a bit of frustration on this front, I remembered that there were some screw holes in the panel where the flashing attaches, so I drove some temporary screws through those and into the plywood beneath, and that held up the panel nicely during the setting time. A bit of babysitting to ensure that it didn't try to buckle or pull apart, and all was good.

During that setting time, I decided to tackle one other potential source of leaks, an old crack in the top panel directly in line with the edge of the back door. This was above the main area of leak problems, and was likely to be contributing some moisture to the interior as well. One of the previous owners had applied some sort of caulk or putty to it, but it was fairly ugly and the seal had dried out, exposing the the interior again. I scraped out the old sealant (an unfortunately all-too-easy task) and sanded down the crack until the two sides were flush again. Here it is all sanded out and ready for some fiberglass resin:

This is now nicely sealed as well, with some sanding and polishing needed to give it a finishing touch.

So where does this leave us? As of writing, the weather has once again been rather spotty, so there's duct tape covering all of the seams until I can get 48 hours of nice weather to re-caulk and install the metal flashing again. I rigged up a downspout from shims and duct tape, and that has done a fabulous job of shuttling the drainage water off the top deck and away from any gaps in my temporary seal. Here's a shot of that just after construction:

If only I had some sort of funky gargoyle to put there instead.

Despite some heavy rainfalls, the inside where the initial dampness was discovered has remained dry throughout, so after I put a few finishing touches on the wood in that interior corner, the bedroom painting fun shall resume this week, we'll have an actual bedroom; and then we're down to attaching the flashing and the ladder, and the boat will be in ship-shape once again.

...until my next adventure with the power saw, that is.