A Christmas Eve Port Story....

Alright, made some more progress on BeBop today, I put in half of the new portholes. Originally I wanted to do the painting first, but the weather just isn't working with me. It's been cloudy, cold and rainy on the weekends with mild temps and sunny while I push a desk during the week. So to keep the project moving I'm doing this 1st and will just put up with the extra hassle of taping them up when I can finally paint.

Ok, here is a picture of what the ports (can see the old rub rail too..yuck!!) looked like when I bought her. The rubber locking gasket was in horrible condition, the chrome lock piece wasn't chrome anymore and the ports had become opaque because the previous owners had used ammonia based cleaners. It really hurt the eyes to look at this every day.


Now, I really wanted to replace them with 8" inch round opening portholes but they cost about $150 a piece. So $1,200 to replace them all. If you've been reading my blog every week you know that kind of money is just not available to me. Don's Marine didn't have anything that would work either. Replacement was the only option on the table really. All the material cost to do this is around $280. This includes 50 feet of locking gasket, the lock strip, the gasket tool and eight pieces of 1/4" 12x24" smoked lexan.

I started by taking out the old ports and lightly sanding around the area, then using the old lexan ports as a template for the new ones. Now the problems started of course. The new gasket was a very close match to the old one but it was slightly thicker so we had to make adjustments to how we cut out the new portholes. I used my jigsaw with a fine tooth blade for this task. It's not that hard to do it accurately if you take it slow. After about 2 hours figuring out the 1st one because of the gasket issue the rest weren't so bad. The hardest part was putting them in. Besides swearing a lot it's definitely a 2 person job..Enter my friend Rich. For each port, I would be in the boat holding the gasket in so Rich could push the new port in. Sounds easy right? Nope...if you've ever tried to replace a bicycle tire think 10 times hard than that..plus you don't have to fabricate new rims. Once you get a feel for it you realize it's not a impossible task, but there is a lot of muscle involved. Here is a close up of one of the newly installed portholes...nice and shiny with a reflection of Richard in it.



Now nothing comes without a price right? This stuff has it's downsides too. For starters it's not as tuff as round stainless steel portholes through bolted to the sides and poses more of risk in heavy seas of getting stoved in by a freak wave. Now they can take a blow, Rich was trying with all he had to push them in after installation and they didn't budge...But I'm planning on carrying a few pieces of emergency replacement lexan anyway and a clever way to cover up to 4 portholes if they get knocked out underway in a gale so I won't sink. Another issue is fit...they are in but not perfect..well yet...I think. It's sorta like when you get a new windshield installed they leave it taped in and say don't drive it in the rain or wash it for a week cause it's settling in. Same thing here....(I think.) When sprayed directly with water the 3 of the 4 damn things leaked a little!. I am flabbergasted. I'm (really) hoping it's the settling in factor...the installation guide says the gasket shrinks a bit so install them with extra material and I did. The absolute worse case senario would be they don't settle and continue to leak. I would then have to buy more lexan and bolt it directly to the outside and seal it with 3M 5200..but it wouldn't look as nice and if I do this after I install the new headliner, I would get to replace half of that again too. Not happy about that....once again I think about that guy from Argentina with the open dugout canoe...he didn't even have a cabin much less a leaking porthole issue. I'm luckier than he is right?

Finally, people who read my blog are asking for a picture to show what she currently looks like so here it is. The new ports leaking or not make her look ALOT better.


I'm taking Christmas off tomorrow. Monday weather permitting the other 4 ports will be installed on the starboard side and with a little luck perhaps I might be able to do some painting on Tuesday if it gets warm enough.


That's it for me today ladies and gentlemen. My wrists hurt (titanium pins) from pushing on the gasket so hard today, I can pick up stuff fine and pull things ok, but a pushing action on my right wrist or twisting action on my left really hurts and I can't do it anymore. I work around the problem. Typing is getting to me now, but I enjoy sharing my experience refitting BeBop with everybody so I put up with it. Hope you all have a Merry Christmas wherever you may be in the world, free from pain or worry...if not...just drink some (spiked) Egg Nog. ^_^ hehe, that should do the trick. Peace to you all.