This winter has been the first real refit since we bought Dauntless three years ago. When we bought this Krogen 42, she was in great shape, in fact the best shape of the 8 KK 42’s I looked at. She had the lowest engine hours, only 1650, and some features we wanted: dual heads, four windows in the rear salon and no built-in furniture in the salon. The Flexsteel leather furniture that the previous owner had gotten for the boat was like new. The nicest leather we had ever felt. We talked about that leather for two years before we actually were in a position to get D.
But with this little use, comes issues that are a result of that little use.
The port side fuel tank started leaking this past summer. It was coming from the forward inboard seam. On opening up the inspection port, it had a lot of rust. More rust than I had seen in the starboard tank.
Now since I had had the boat, I’d had problems with water getting into the tank. During the last days of my Atlantic Passage, this became a critical problem that had me changing or emptying fuel filters every few hours. You can read those details here: Dauntless-crosses-the-north-atlantic-the-post-mortem
Last summer in Holland, with the help of Marinus, another Krogen owner, I finally figured out the source of the water was the stink’in fuel vent. In one of the few poor decisions Kadey Krogen made in the design of this boat, the fuel vent was under the rub rail. As the Krogen rolls its way across the Atlantic this became an issue when I was in very big seas and the stabilizers were not working as well as they should for reasons related to operator (ME) error.
To fix the tank issues, we decided to add three more larger inspection ports. This will allow the two-part epoxy sealant to be applied.
Looking at the pictures of the opened tank, one can see the rust pattern from the water getting into the vent.
Also, when I had purposely overfilled this tank by about 10 gallons, in part to see what would happen, I had the unpleasant surprise to see fuel leaking out of the tank into the bilge. It was not apparent where this fuel was coming from. This picture shows the fitting itself was poorly installed and the screws used rusted and basically left small holes for fuel to get out or even rain water that was on top of the tank to get in.
From the amount of rust, this tank was not sued for quite some time, years, but left with some water. Once I got the boat, this tank had been the problem child, therefore I had a tendency not to use it as much, which ended up exacerbating the problem.
Here are some before pictures. The after pictures will come when done.
Dauntless at Sea 