You know...just about the time you figure all is well, something comes along that upsets the apple cart. Last Sunday my wife BJ and I paid a visit to Betty Jane just to make sure she was alright. Because of the abnormally cold weather in Florida this winter we haven't done much day tripping of late and our time aboard, at least for the past couple of months, has consisted basically of checking to make sure Betty's main engine hasn't frozen up solid, her water system isn't generating ice cubes, and her lines and other peripherals are chuggin' along okay.

So what happened here? The way I figure it, during an extraordinarily high tide during the preceding week (North Florida tends to have radically high/low tides during the winter months) one of Betty's criss-crossed stern lines got hung up under one of the Weaver davit brackets on her swim platform. As the tide went out, the line remained in place under the bracket, eventually pulling it up and away, along with a sizable chunk of one of the planks of the swim platform.

This particular plank section was slightly broken at the time my wife and I purchased Betty in Maryland, by the way, perhaps due to a crunchy encounter with a Chesapeake Bay piling. So the tragic little uproar shown above had historical antecedents.

At any rate, while I removed the Weaver bracket with ease thanks to the corrosion-resistance of high-grade stainless-steel bolts and nuts, the remainder of the plank was another story. Because the bronze (or brass...I'm not sure which) bolt fastening the plank section to the support underneath was seriously melded with a counter-sunk nut under a teak bung (thanks to effects of mucho saltwater), I had to twist and break the bolt off using a couple of pairs of trusty Vice Grips.

The fix turned out to be a little more complicated than I'd originally hoped for. For starters, I'd thought to simply 'squish,' as my wife and friends from neighboring boats suggested, the broken plank section back into place, add some epoxy to the equation to unitize the whole, and after the whole shebang had cured, smooth it out with an electric sander to achieve a reasonable aesthetic.

I should have known! After I'd attempted to put everything back together with slow-curing epoxy, the job simply did not even come close to my (some would perhaps say) rather perfectionist standards concerning boat repair. Indeed, while the job may have looked vaguely like a silk purse to a dairy farmer (not to be overly critical of the folks I used to milk cows with as a lad) it nevertheless bore the aroma of a sow's ear to me (not to be overly critical of the porcine race I used to feed and care for as a lad) and would never have been satisfactory long-term.

"I don't have time to fix this thing the way it really needs to be fixed," I noted, after ripping out the squished-epoxy extravaganza I'd managed to create before it cured. "But I bet my boat-carpenter friend Steve Mattke does."

Last I knew, Steve was pretty well along with the project and I can hardly wait to see the results. Yeah, scarfing in a new section of teak plank will cost my wife and I a couple of hundred dollars, most likely, but the job will finally effect a repair that's been hanging fire now for almost five years. And most likely, the whole thing'll look better than ever!

And incidentally...someone at the recent Miami Boat Show told me about a plate assembly now made by Weaver that lets you remove its problematic spring-loaded mechanism (and stow it some place safe) until you actually are going to use it. I'm gonna checkidout!