The Pool Deck

I hate to say it, but Carver did a poor job of keeping water out of the so-called "dry" areas of this yacht. In The Harbor Queen, December 1, 2004, you read about how ordinary seas, striking the side of the hull, flood into the engine room and short out expensive electrical components. And in the post of February 1, 2005 – A Window on Carver – you learned that waves cascading over the bow were flooding the fully-enclosed, hardshell bridge, due to major voids in the window bedding, and a pooly caulked cabin-top installation. Now, you're going to get "the rest of the story." For any photograph below, please click it directly, for a close-up.

The 506 was offered with several options for the spacious aft deck, which is fully covered with a hardshell cabin top. In one configuration, roll-up and zip-out Eisenglas windows fill the solid aluminum frames that surround the aft deck on three sides. This is the "warm weather" configuration. In another, glass windows replace all the Eisenglas, creating a completely enclosed, all-weather "cabin." Wing doors, port and starboard, close off this deck from the exterior side decks that permit passage to the bow. This is the model that we bought, and that you can see at the left.

Although the "exterior" heritage of this deck is obvious from its molded fiberglass non-skid sole and aft freeing ports port and starboard, in the fully-enclosed version – which Carver supplies with a snap-down exterior-grade carpet matching the ones on the bridge – this space is a cabin. Although it has the look and feel of a "sunroom" – which is actually what we call it – it is functionally "inside" the yacht. Where it is supposed to be dry. Even when it is wet, outside. Or so we fantasized.

But Carver never really thought this all through. Or, they never expected anybody to take the 506 out in any seas greater than, say, 2 inches. But we're old sailors, and six-foot or greater seas crashing over the bow and cascading over the entire superstructure as we slog our way to the Channel Islands is, to put a fine point on it, a milk run.

But, it turns out that every time we made one of these milk runs, the entire sunroom would end up with the carpet complely flooded. Moreover, copious amounts of saltwater would leak into the master stateroom just below, soak the cushion on the master double berth, saturate the carpet, and run into one of the light switches on the aft bulkhead.

The cleanup of these interior spaces was such a pain in the ass that we hated taking the boat out of the marina. We literally had to, after each outing, completely remove the sunroom carpet to the dock, hose it out with fresh water, and then spread it over the foredeck to dry for a week. And, in the master stateroom below, we had to change out a brass plated cover plate on a light switch for a new one every cruise, as it would immediately corrode as soon as a drop of salt water touched it. Luxury yacht, indeed.

Now, there were two design flaws in the Carver 506 that contributed to this mess. First, the wing doors leading to the exterior decks port and starboard were each at the aft end of a 15-foot long, 18-inch wide "sluice" formed by the deck itself, the 24"-high bulwarks on one side, and the side of the cabin and bridge superstructure on the other. When the yacht is running on a plane, the side decks slope upwards towards the bow, at about 4 degrees. The wing doors are at the aft, low end. And when a wave breaks over the bow, tons of water – many cubic yards worth – cascade down the side decks, hit the wing doors square on, and have nowhere to go! It looks, literally, like one of those TV shows where the dam at the head of the valley breaks, and you see a closeup of that wall of water barreling after ranchers and John Deere salesmen.

The reason that all this water has nowhere to go is that Carver didn't bother putting freeing ports at the extreme aft end of this deck, through the bulwarks, so that all this water could drain quickly overboard. Instead, it just pools there, to a depth of, typically, 4 inches. They did put freeing ports, small ones, about 4 feet forward of the wing doors, but gee, fellows, when the boat is running on a plane, those ports are elevated a few inches above the low point of the deck, and upstream, so to speak.

Now, I lied a little above for dramatic effect. There actually was a place for the water to go, and that brings us to design flaw #2. The half-inch thick, clear plexiglass wing doors, while having side flanges and weatherstripping on each side, both are designed with 1/2-inch gaps under each door, between the door panel and the door sill. These gaps, each with a cross section of about 12 square inches, permitted the tons of water coming every few seconds over the bow, and pooling to a depth of 4 inches outside the wing doors, to then drain right into the sunroom, and all the way aft, to those "leftover" freeing ports in the far corners of the deck. Ahh! That's what they were for!

Now, I knew that the experienced naval architects, engineers, and shipwrights out there in Wisconsin would not take the word of a simple Silicon Valley engineer, so I took a bunch of photographs of the crime scene, appropriately labeled with circles and arrows and an explanation on each one, and wrote a big report.

In one photo, three paragraphs above, you can see the "artist's conception" of how the water pools outside of the wing door. Click on it to zoom in on the details. And in the second photo , you can see a closeup of that unbelievable gap under the wing door. Also, I failed to mention the total absence of caulking between the deck and the wing door sill and frame. Even without the gap, it leaked profoundly. More sloppy manufacturing, or perhaps lousy field assembly.

How did we fix all of this? We simply retrofitted the boat, at considerable expense, to eliminate the two major flaws. First, we had Harry Gibson, the local fiberglass wizard, fabricate large freeing ports at the extreme aft, outboard end of each side deck.

Harry, who spends most of his life repairing the crushed bows of sleek racing sailboats whose skippers forgot to yell "starboard", found these freeing ports a real challenge, as they had to simultaneously penetrate not only the bulwarks – a structure physically separate from the hull – but also the molded gunwales that were part of the hull proper. The ports cosmetically each had to look like a single "hole", but in fact, were comprised of two facing sides that could not be allowed to be bonded together.

The brilliance of his work shows here. This freeing port could have been original equipment, it is so perfect, had only Carver thought of it.

The other flaw, the wing door sill gap, was solved by welding an aluminum flange on the bottom of the door frame to match the pre-existing flanges on either side, thus plugging up the gap. This, plus fancy new weatherstripping, and several pounds of caulking compound, completed the job – a job that we never should have had to do in the first place.

The butcher's bill for all of this was about $5,000. I haven't had time to prepare a final report for Carver, but I will do so soon. And, they will be invoiced for the retrofits. It's not the money, it's the principle. There's no excuse for a boat of this class or price to have such obvious design oversights. I'll report here, or in a future post, if, and when, we get reimbursed.

For the lack of freeing ports in the bulwarks, and for wing doors that might as well have been screen doors, I give Carver a C-.

By the way, if you'd like to see a complete photo gallery of the installation of the freeing ports, go here. At the top of the window, press PAUSE, and turn Captions ON. Single step through the gallery with the right and left arrow keys.