We filled the jon boat up with water all the way to the gunwales. Just to see if those alleged leaks are real.
They're real alright. Our "Commissary Boat" should be the "Colander Boat." There were drops of water forming in at least ten different places, some of them a lot more than drops, and they were all coming through the rivets in the aluminum. No wonder the Mule was feeling a little sluggish by the time we hit camp last fall.
We are not the only ones with this problem. Judging by the amount of bandwidth devoted to it on the web, everyone in the world has suffered from a case of drippy rivets at some point in their lives. And all of them say the only cure is a marine epoxy called "Gluvit."
So we got some- and it is bad, bad stuff. A viciously toxic chemical compound developed by rogue scientists from Chernobyl in their spare time. You have to combine the resin and the catalyst then turn the boat over while still in your hazmat suit and quickly paint it on the trouble spots on the outside of the hull before the EPA can mobilize and the birds fall from the trees. We went ahead and coated every rivet that showed from the bottom and can now tell you - without even putting it in the water - that our leaky days are over. This shit works.
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In music news, the John Hartford song is up on the Song List page now. It's really a worthy addition too. "Too thick to navigate, too thin to plow." Good stuff. The first audio link is not John Hartford, though, it's a band called "Wissahickon Chicken Shack" doing it in a much more singable, strummable style. More like the way The Band would have done it. Dare we say it's even...Wagon Wheelesque? The second link is for those who know what it's like to get relegated to playing your guitar on a cooler in your garage. You know what I'm talking about.
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