Early on when owning a recently-purchased brokerage boat, it’s always a little game of “catch up” hunting down the deck leaks one inherits. During our summer season in New England I fixed a few but I have a few more to go, primarily as a result of Hinckley Yacht Services either having chosen poor sealants, having done a poor job of preparing mating surfaces, or both when sealing items.

The result has been several leaks related to work Hinckley had recently completed. Blue Moon‘s former owners were charged a metric mint in labor by Hinckley, yet only three seasons or so after Hinckley re sealed her chainplates, two of them have already sprung leaks since we have owned her. I fixed the port forward chainplate in Boston this year, and I had to use caulk as I had no butyl tape aboard. Now the port cap shroud sprung a leak, so yesterday I put in a couple of hours re sealing it. But unlike Hinckley, I took the time to properly prepare the mating surfaces and used butyl tape, which is always indicated for sealing applications where parts may move when they come under load. It’s much more expensive and labor intensive to use butyl tape, but according to her current owner, my Sabre 42’s chainplates STILL don’t leak and I last re sealed them in 2015. That’s more like it! Given the service rates they charge, it’s indefensible that Hinckley did not use the best available materials when doing this work. Eventually I will re seal all of Blue Moon‘s chainplates with butyl tape but for now I just needed to get the leaky one sealed back up.