surprise! wet foam in stringers
 

as i was removing the glass on the transom to remove the coring i cut back the stringers, as i mad my first cut midway up the stringer water begins rolling out. i made another inspection cut about 1.5 feet from the transom and same thing. what now? its a 23 inboard and im in south florida dont know if i should be putting this much time into an inboard, which is a great boat but realistically an outboard would be much better for so. fl.. thinking my time would be better spent on an outboard model. any suggestions, advice?

Put a bracket on it and convert it to an out board. You already have the full transom which is very desirable when it gets rough.

strick

Will the prop tunnel effect his performance with an outboard?

turn it into an outboard with a bracket. best decision you will make

From my understanding it doesn't workout well because of the tunnel

didnt think about that.

Aside ftom access to work on the bottom wouldnt it be relatively easy to glass over snd cOver the tunnel? Maby will the void with foam?

i dont know as to the ease of doing it, but i think before i did that i would end up buying or trading for an outboard or i/o model. just dont know if i should be that concerned with the foam being wet.

I just did it to mine you will have to do it to any of these boats that havn't been touched its foam just gut it and pour new the inboard is well worth it when your done just cut large. Access ports on the top of the stringers and then close them back up when done but don't destroy a true inboard there's not enough of them out there. Just think you will be the only boat going the same speed when the weather goes south :)

If the floor is in good shape . . . I'd try to dry out the foam without ripping the boat apart. You can use a hole saw and drill a few 2" holes in the stringer (2" up from bottom of the stringer) to get a better idea of the situation. It's far easier to patch bunch of 2" holes than replace the entire stringer and floor ;). What I've seen in a few other boats is that only the bottom 1" of foam gets wet and the rest of the foam inside the stringer is dry . . . If that's the case just you can fix it easily without ripping the entire boat to pieces.

I agree if the deck is solid drill 2" holes. I wonder if you shrink wrap the boat and put a dehumidifier on the boat and let it run for a couple weeks will it dry out the stringer?

the floor is solid and thats why i didnt want to tear it out. i'm at work today and tomorrow i will drill a few more holes on the sides of the strungers and see what i find. its pretty warm down hear today so hopefully that will be enough to dry it out.

I'm pretty convinced that this is a common older SeaCraft issue and even more common with inboards with leaky shaft seals and such. You got to realize that back in the 70's drip less shaft seals were not around yet. My boat is a 76 23' inboard and the previous owner kept it in the water at a slip. I noticed the boat was sitting low in the water and bought it any how. Well my boat was wet, soaked in fact. I ran it this way last season and had to keep the scupper drains plugged all the time because they let more water in then out. I keep my boat on a trailer and I believe it dried out quite a lot over the winter. I splashed my boat on Saturday for the first time since last season with full tanks and it was sitting an 1" higher than last season. I was able to finally run the boat without the drain plugs in and the scuppers finally drain water!