Jeff, Prior to owning "Dauntless" our 23 we owned a 17. I sold it to a friend of mine. When Jason took the boat from me he went bananas cleaning it up. It looked great. However, when he tackled the inside of the cabin he decided to remove everything and to go in there with a hose to wash the whole thing down. I was a little skeptical about this approach as I was afraid water would make it to places that might be difficult to dry. When he was finished the inside sparkled!...however, whenever you stepped on the cabin floor near the v-berth it would flex and a little bit of water would ooze up through some stress cracks that had developed right where the floor rolls up 90 degrees and becomes the vertical side of the rear of the v-berth. Look for spider web like cracks in the gelcoat on the floor or long straight cracks running right where the floor turns up into the backs vertical side of the v-berth. I think it's probably a fairly common thing and my opinion would be that it's not really a huge concern. What is a concern though would be to not let water lay there and to find out where the water came from and try to mitigate that. My 17 did not have any wood under the floor, rather, the liner sits almost right on top of the hull itself. It turned out that there was a little space between the liner and the hull where it (the liner) was flexing. After a lot of "what to do's" we decided that water had slipped between the hull and the liner (the floor is part of the liner) and the fact the floor was showing some weakness and flexing was allowing it to act like a water pump pushing the water up through the stress cracks. Obviously the floor was unsupported in the area it was flexing. We decided to carefully cut the flexing part of the floor out in a nice square piece and lift it out. I believe Jason did this with a battery powered small rotary saw adjusting the depth to just what was necessary to cut the thickness of the liner. After lifting out the piece of floor it became obvious that there was somewhat of a gap between the floor and the hull itself making that area of the floor unsupported. After many years (and sasquatch sized people like me stepping on it) the piece of floor had just begun to weaken and was flexing. The first thing we did was to let it dry out completely and to clean the area on the back side of the piece we removed as well as the the area of the inside of the hull that was now exposed. Then we mixed up a big batch of thickened West System epoxy with colloidal silica in it to make it like peanut butter. We painted both the bottom of the floor piece and the inside of the hull with Un-thickened epoxy first so that the epoxy could penetrate the pieces and then took the peanut butter thickened epoxy and covered the top of the exposed hull with enough of it so that when the piece of floor was put back in place there was a solid bond between the hull and the floor (it was no longer unsupported anywhere). We weighted the piece of floor down with sandbags until it cured. Then we ground a taper all the way along the joint area and laid in a couple of strips of 2 inch glass tape. That was sanded smooth and the floor was back in, and now as solid as a rock. Jason never bothered to cosmetically finish the repair. Instead he just had a throw rug on it. I'd have gone on to prime it and paint it. You could gelcoat it but you'd have to have better gelcoat skills than I do! hahaha. You do have to find out where that water is coming from. Could anything have spilled inside and found a way to leak under the liner? How about your keel lifting pendant hole? Had any really rowdy sails lately where water could have been splashing up through the hole? How about through hull's? Check the molded in through hull for the cockpit scupper and make sure the hose connection is good and tight and the hose is not dried out or cracked. And of course my favorite...Rain water. On these older boats keeping everything sealed can be a challenge and sooner or later you will need to re-bed the deck hardware in new sealant. Not a fun job. We just got done removing the aluminum toe rail from Dauntless, cleaning it and rebedding it.....and we still have a little leak when we heel her over and put the toe rail in the water! UGH! Guess that's part of the fun of it......yeah right! Good luck. I'm sure some other folks will chime in with their experiences to help out. Sean M23 "Dauntless" _www.havasumontgomerys.funtigo.com_ (http://www.havasumontgomerys.funtigo.com)
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