I think we all agree that we know which anchor works best, Jeff.  Which one?  Don't ask!

Good luck with your new boat,

--Milt Baker, Nordhavn 47 Bluewater

Jeff wrote:

Hopefully, this thread doesn't start a ruckus like asking which anchor is
best.  ;-)

I posted some questions about fuel tank replacement earlier this spring.
With advice from some of you, it looks like we can save ourselves $15,000
and a lot of hassle.

A recap:  We have a 1979 Taiwanese 40' tri-cabin trawler.  We've had it a
bit over a year and it's been a project boat from the beginning.  It's spent
more time out of the water than it's spent in the water from May 2010 until
March 2011.  We rebuilt one diesel and one transmission, removed a lot of
the teak deck, re-cored the cockpit deck and the vberth roof, rebuilt the
entire blackwater system, installed new batteries and chargers, polished the
fuel and so forth.

This spring, we had the bilges professionally scrubbed.  All of the
mechanical work had left some oil and diesel residues and the previous leaks
had left some stale smells.  We topped off the tanks this spring and
suddenly had a very bad diesel smell once again.  We had our boat yard folks
check it out. He said our tanks were bad and needed to be replaced.  He said
we would be looking at somewhere around $15,000 to do the job.

We thought we had bought this boat cheaply enough to cover the work it
needed.  This repair tab would have pushed the dollars well over the top.
So, we wrote on this blog for advice and also carefully researched our
issues.  We are now pretty confident the boatyard was wrong.

Our tanks are steel and hold over 200 gallons each.  They're 4' long and
about 2' feet wide.  The tops are heavily corroded around the filler hoses
due to water leaks around the deck filler cap.  The starboard tank is the
worst of the two.  Of course, it's very hard to see and work on the tanks.
However, the sides appear to be just fine - a rust patina, but no scale.

When we had the fuel polished, the company removed water but no rust scale
from inside the tanks.  The filler cap o-rings had failed and were missing.

The boatyard lead us to believe the top corrosion had gone through the steel
and was wicking diesel, giving us the strong diesel smell. We removed the
scale and applied a rust converter to the tops, where we can get to them.
The tops have lost a lot of metal, but our opinion and the opinion of the
local Belzona representative is that the tops are weakened but still intact.
The culprit appears to be 32 year old hoses.  We now have virtually no
diesel smell, even though the boat has been recently run in choppy water
that would have splashed diesel against the tank tops.

Our plan now is to:

1. Apply a last coat of rust converter to tame the rust
2. Apply 3 coats of 2 different Belzona industrial epoxy treatments to the
   tops
3. Remove the old hoses - both tank filler and breather hoses
4. Install new hoses

We believe this work should.  New tanks would have of course solved the
problem, too.  The tops would go away and new hoses would have been
installed.  However, the fix we currently have planned will cost us about
$100 - not $15,000.

We'll provide a follow up for those interested in this issue.

Roger
Seattle, WA