Now it was time to tear the floor out of the salon and find out what’s going on with that stupid hole I’ve almost fallen into 100 times. But first, gotta get that water out.

This was a terrible job, mostly because I lacked the proper tools. The batteries were long dead so even though there were a couple of old bilge pumps laying around, they didn’t work. (It later turned out one of the battery cables was loose so shorepower wasn’t charging anything). I ended up using the shopvac to suck the water out, which meant carrying 3 gallons of water topside and emptying it out about every 4 minutes for about an hour. It was exhausting.

But we carry on and start tearing out flooring. I started forward at the entrance to the head and worked back toward the hole. This was mostly because of how the boards were set and which one’s were loose.

Aaaaand….termites. This was right under the locker and mast support. In addition to eating most of those, they also ate the floor stringers but had politely built a nest to hold up the floor. In the first picture, I’m standing on the starboard side where the berth used to be, looking down and port. Straight out from my right foot you can see where the mast support went through the floor and right next to that is the metal rod that ran adjacent to it. The other two pictures are just detail views of the excavation. And make no mistake, there were 1000s of live termites living in there and it smelled wonderful!

Once that was all thrown out, the mast riser is visible. I took the following picture from the galley looking starboard (note the metal rod to keep your bearings) and the door to the head is at the far right of the picture. The port berthing is still in tact, but I’ve removed the top where the mattress would go.

It seemed pretty obvious at this point that everything in this space needed to go. The thinking being to take everything to the fiberglass hull.

And finally clean and inspect everything.