Pilothouse Structural Rebuild
The pilothouse, up above the saloon, was added to Island Eagle by her second or third owner, in about 1970. When we bought IE we noticed that the workmanship on the pilothouse was not of the same calibre as that of the rest of the vessel, and since it passed the survey OK we sort of didn't pay that much attention to it. As part of the pilothouse refurbishment we decided to remove the acoustic tile from the ceiling and replace it with yellow cedar, and the day that the crew pulled off the tiles I got a call from them telling me that they'd found a few soft spots in the roof. I told them to follow the soft spots and also to send me a few pictures of what they found. The next night I had the whole picture, and it was not a pretty sight:
The rot started in the aft corners where the roof met the wall, in both the port and starboard corners:
Water had also seeped down in the window frames and the plywood at the bottom of each bay was soft. As an added bonus, the fiberglass had been put on with polyester resin, which was ready to come off if you looked at it crosseyed:
Clearly, we had to do something. After consulting with the crew, we decided that it would be easier to just rebuild the entire pilothouse rather than to try and repair all of the damage. We would also take the opportunity to add a door in the aft bulkhead as well as to expand the aft window (the top original one was only 5' 6" off deck, which made it impossible to see aft without hunching down).
The problem with the reconstruction was that it would mean opening up the boat to the elements. The crew decided to build a canopy over the pilothouse to protect. Now, remember that IE is 60 feet overall, and the pilothouse roof is already almost 20 feet off the water. On top of this they built a structure which quickly gained the name "the covered wagon":
Once they were protected they went to work demolishing the old pilothouse and then rebuilding a new one (note the "Help Wanted" signs, the crew were having fun pulling my leg):
Sills are teak, all studs and beams are old-growth fir, and the entire structure was then covered with proper marine plywood and finished with glass and epoxy:
Here's the roof, before the final application of nonskid:
Finally, almost 6 weeks later than we expected, we were back where we began. Sigh.
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