I have to take Jim’s side, here.
I can understand Annie’s view, now that her urge to finish SibLim and go cruising must be strong.

I, on the other hand, take great pleasure in sailing my boats, that is, the sailing process itself. Others want to make voyages and see new coasts, while others again want to go racing. Good for them. I no longer make excuses for not travelling; I just do the things I prefer. One thing I really like is to visit my boats during winter. Since my harbour is ice-free and storm safe, I keep my boats afloat, and simply go and visit them, light the stove and a heater, brew coffee, and sit there, either alone, or more often with a mate, and discuss boats, ideas and life, etc. Planning small odd jobs, like that parachute drogue I recently made, stuff like that. Johanna was a great ‘winter boat’ in this sense, but Ingeborg is also a joy to just sit down in for 2-3 persons and have a good yarn.

My boating is anything but heroic, but I don’t care. We have different reasons for playing with boats. Everyone cannot be heroes.

Arne
(...safely back home again after three days in hospital...)

Anonymous wrote:

Some feedback, please. I have a teak strip deck on Elsie N (soon to be "Hobbit") laid in graphite epoxy, held in place by screws and washers for spacing and hold down. Te original thickness was 1/8". It is now about 3/32" with epoxy ridges. (Good non-skid.) Here and there, the teak is pulling away from the epoxy. Since removing the winter cover, I have noticed them. After a rain, many of them close up.
I wonder if my lovely deck has reached it's best before date and needs to be removed or glassed (or dyneled) over.

Is there some compound I could squeeze into these narrow cracks to ge sone more life out of this deck?

Annie, I remember you telling me you wet Badger's deck down once a day with sea water.

Any suggestions? I did a search of our files without finding anything.

Cheers, Jim

The first thing to remember is that the teak is a handsome, low-maintenance non-skid finish.  One of the best ways to maintain it is to keep it well impregnated with salt.  Your boat has been out of the water through numerous freeze-thaw cycles in Nova Scotia's notoriously boat-unfriendly climate for about ten years now, so it's hardly surprising there is some damage. But it's not structural.  It's cosmetic.  You've far more important things to do and a complete refit to the decks.  Launch your boat and go sailing.

Minor splits in the teak can be ignored.  Launch your boat and go sailing.

Lifting planks can have a bit of graphite/epoxy dribbled under the edges.  Weight it down.  Clean off the excess.  Launch your boat and go sailing.

Planks that are actually coming away can be chiselled out.  Fit a new piece of teak or iroko between the existing epoxy/graphite boundaries.  Launch your boat and go sailing.

Trinidad has its own teak plantations.  Teak is cheaper there than oregon.  Launch your boat and go sailing down to Trinidad, buy some teak and do any repairs necessary there.

In short, Jim, you've owned Elsie for 6 years now.  You can always find something else to do on her, but in the meantime like all of us, you aren't getting any younger.  You've done enough on her now.  Take off the old name, put on the new and launch your boat and go sailing.  At this rate I'll be sailing before you are!!!

Thanks for the feedback.

I will have a look at Elastodeck for consideration. Interesting.

One scenario I was thinking I could do.

Sand the coach-roof smooth. Wipe with acetone. Level any dips with epoxy filler. Glass the coach-roof and either use nonskid paint or Brightside one-part polyurethane with crushed walnut shells for grip. It worked well for me before. But the non-skid paint sounds attractive. It would preserve the teak deck look to a degree but far less area to maintain. I  would like to hang on to the teak on the fore-deck and after-deck for a few more years. Perhaps the Sikaflex would do that for me. I have ridges where the graphite epoxy stands proud. Better to sand them down level? Although they help a lot with non-skid, perhaps they increase the likelihood oh leveraging open cracks?

I am off to Vancouver for two weeks tomorrow.

This always seems to be the long term outcome of Teak decks. Very nice when still young, but eventually the timber wears down to the point where major refurbishment is needed. In the older days when the teak was glued and screwed down, the screws and plugs on top of them caused problems with the plugs wearing away, and then the screw heads eventually protruding from the surface.

Sikaflex is a sealant often used for caulking teak decking so this might help fill the gaps, or a similar sealant. But eventually some major refurbishment is going to be needed. Some friends of mine who rebuilt a 47' fiberglass yacht with teak decks fiber-glassed over the teak and then painted the decks with non-skid paint. They had to do quite a lot of work stabilising the teak before applying the fiberglass.