I found pretty simple and satisfactory solutions to both these problems. I take a small strip of rag about an inch wide and four inches long, wrap it a couple of times around the centerboard rope and push it tight against the blowhole. I get a bit of hissing but no water. Of course by the end of the season the piece of rag could be mistaken for a biology experiment, but rags are cheap.
For the stern drains I simply bought a couple of 85-cent corks at the hardware store and stick them in before I leave the mooring. In the event I take on serious water (has happened a couple of times) I can just kick them out with my toe and things drain. David Hill M17 619 Grouper ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:40:39 -0800 From: " Richard Everett " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: M_Boats: M17 leak To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" We came up with a pretty simple plug for the "blowhole" effect in the M17 by slicing a piece of 2 inch long rubber tubing (something like the black rubber automotive fuel line tubing) which had an ID that was a tight fit around the line used to draw up the keel and had an OD that was a snug fit into the "blowhole". Actually, I trimmed a section of a piece of tubing that was too large to fit in the hole down a bit so that it would not get permanently stuck down in the hole. So all in all, it makes for a nice gasket to keep the water out of the cockpit. Having said all that, we still get water in the cockpit because even in a mild chop water seems to flow in through the stern cockpit drain holes. They have backflow prevention devices inline, but for some reason a trickle will still flow through and after awhile there is around a half inch of water sloshing around in the aft section of the cockpit. It does get above this amount because then it starts draining back out. I was considering installing some sort of ball valve shutoff for the two drain lines, but it would be bad to forget to open them up and then get a serious amount of water suddenly in the cockpit. :-( Maybe the solution is to always wear heavy rubber boots... _______________________________________________ http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/montgomery_boats
