Fixing a hole where the sea came in

Last week Nico's Explorer got holed after a collision in the surf during a Peddelpraat club trip. I felt bad for him as he looked very depressed seeing the gaping shredded hole in his personal sea kayak.

I have been there before. By now I am quite confident to do glass-fibre repairs, but only very rarely take on (emergency) repairs for desparate friends. Not surprisingly one gets more and more friends by doing this. As long as I was not the one responsible for the damage in the first place. So I came up with a cunning plan; so cunning...

Today Nico and I organized a glass-fibre repair workshop. The idea was to show how to do a sea kayak repair so the local paddling group could deal with that themselves (or help others) when this comes up again.

After the successful repair of Nico's kayak, a leak-finding routine and a latex seal replacement talk, I am afraid I could well end-up being asked for more boat repair workshops, which is actually NOT what I want. A sure fate of all cunning plans...

So please do not invite me for repair workshops !

The captions of the pictures in above slide-show give some insight in the repair process and our considerations for this particular repair.

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go

I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go

(Fixing a Hole - The Beatles)