Shebeen is another Ballad (hull number 85) owned by Ken Morgan since 1987 that has been extensively raced (very successfully in many cases) and cruised having completed a North Atlantic circuit, a trip up to Oslo and the YM Triangle Race to name just a few of her adventure. Many thanks to Ken for digging out the below photos that will hopefully be of use to other Ballad owners.
Shebeen exhibited the infamous rusty water in the bilges by the mast and starting taking a dribble of water through the front of the keel.
Shebeens rusty bilges Jan 2005
On inspection, it appeared the crack was rather a lot worse than we had on Triola!
Ken opted to replace the truss with a Stainless steel version that followed the original design. Encapsulated in resin, and bolted through the forward bulkhead. For reasons I will put in my build write up, and partially covered here, we did not choose this route with our repair.
New truss
Ken commented “A couple of years later (I think it was just after the YM Triangle Race followed immediately by the Round the Island Race) I found the rigging going slack. I tightened it but very quickly it slacked off again. It soon became apparent that either the mast was going down (it wasn’t) or the chain plates were going up. Effectively the sides of the boat were being pulled up. I stripped out much of the interior, cut into the transverse beam and found another bit of very heavily corroded/disintegrating mild steel encased in the fibreglass. The MS was wing shaped, about 900mm long. My solution was drastic. A sheet of 18mm marine ply cut into 3 much wider wings (c 1800/2000mm) glassed onto the hull and together as a laminated beam. The existing ply bulkhead was bolted to the new beam. I used what was left of the ply to make a couple of smaller bulkheads forward of the heads. ”
On Triola, no water will penetrate to the transverse steel beam as we have not bolted through it, we have installed a new mini bulkhead just aft of the main bulkhead. We will also be stiffening up the main bulkhead by ‘top hatting’ it with GRP.
Thanks again to Ken for digging these out.