Goodbye Transom!

Well I pulled the top section of fibreglass off and there was a small amount of rot. So I pulled back a bit more and found a little more rot. So I pulled off a little more. The wood was quite wet and I had my suspicions, so I bit the bullet and ripped it all off. Sure enough, there was a couple of good rot patches in the bottom corners.

Well, not what I had hoped to see, but at the end of the day, the boat needs to be safe for my family and I to use. So it's time to get rid of the transom. The whole outer sheet of ply had been held on with brass screws every 3 inches or so, probably more than half were rotted and wouldn't come out, fortunately there wasn't a whole lot of holding power in the rotted wood.

Here is what it looked like once I got the plywood off, exposing the original transom:

And a close up of the centre were you can see the hole made through the transom for the inboard engine.
As you can see once the ply was removed, the transom is in pretty bad shape - not what you'd want to trust your life to. It was surprising to see all the holes drilled through the transom over the years:

And now, for the final step.....Goodbye Transom!