Seacocks do the hokey cokey

Today was the annual wallet emptying day at the sailing club,  Always nice to catch up with everyone and find out just how little work has been done by all,,, one member, while discussing the merits of having his boat on the drive, said "it's like being taunted every time I leave the house.. but I won't be bullied, I'll paint it when I feel like painting it".   I had to admire his stance on bullying :)
After a spot of lunch at the R.N.L.I, I made my way home, battling with whether I should get out and work on the boat or sit in front of the laptop surfing eBay and other time swallowing sites... Ciao Bella won, she's obviously a bigger bully than the aforementioned boat.
Despite yesterdays efforts with the hatch, an over night downpour of biblical proportions meant I wasn't too surprised to find water still coming through the hatch area.It looked like it was coming in through the bottom sill. There is a piece of wood screwed to the sill which is supposed to stop water coming in but it looks like it is seeping under neath.  I took this piece out, surprisingly it, and the sill are still sound, so I cleaned them up; blew them down with the airline, splodged some sikaflex into the join and reassembled. Hopefully that should reduce the amount of wet stuff in the cabin.

While at the club this morning I also caught up with Roger, who furnished me with two 4" marine ply discs for the seacocks backing pads.  Disassembling the seacocks was easy enough once I'd got the sanitation hose off the hose tails.  The small inlet one came off easy enough but the large outlet pipe was a royal pain in the backside. In the end I had to cut it off.

I'm much happier with the bigger pads and hopefully that'll be the last time for a while that I'll have to grapple with these. I'd just like to say thanks to Gypsy Phil (no that's not an insult,his name is Phil and his boat is called Gypsy) for shaming me into action :o).
Other small jobs knocked off the list were the upper and lower rudder stock bearings and the lower pintle. Where the pintle had been too long it had pushed the rudder stock up whenever the skeg touched the sand, this had put too much strain on the bearing caps and had pushed the screws out of the top bearing cap and sheared the heads off screws in the lower bearing cap.
As the holes for the screws at the top had stripped and been elongated, I turned the cap 45 degrees and drilled new holes.  I then splodged some (you guessed it) sikaflex around the mating surface and screwed it down.  The lower one just needed the broken screws winding out, I then sikaflexed the joint and reassembled.
The lower pintle was trimmed with the angle grinder.  As always there is a 'one step back'. While working on the rudder I noticed rust seeping out of some cracks in the GRP.  I ground out the cracks with the angle grinder while I had it to hand and will have the make good when the weather improves.   I know this will be a medium term solution as once there is rust in there it will eventually expand and keep splitting the rudder.  I will start to think about making a new stock and rudder blade in a couple of years, assuming my repairs hold out that long.