Hello All, I am the new owner of the Fiddlers Green, a 1978 BCC built and finished by Sam Morse, all teak outside with rosewood/cherry wood interior, full head starboard forward and galley starboard aft, dinette port forward/nav station port aft. She has a sleeping vee birth and has the shop bench under the doghouse as well.
When I first saw her photos I could see that she was not sitting on her intended waterline, she had been in the same boat slip for many years without moving and terribly neglected but when she was given some love it was by a completely incompetent owner (god rest his soul). As an example of his idea of maintenance was to paint all the exterior teak with Bear’s (Home Depot’s Brand) exterior latex flat house paint mixed to the color of marine Cetol, needles to say, it was peeling off in sheets when I obtained the boat…Ironically the color of cetol is almost universally hated but is endured due to the protective quality of the product, someone should have told him that it is not the color that is the key to the products limited success! Also it wold have been nice if he ahd not also painted the stanchion bases and even the end of the whisker pole was not spared paint to the height of the bulwark.
Anyway, after removing hundreds of pounds of zebra mussels and shifting gear to its rightful places she was still sitting down by the bow with only one 35# CQR on the sprit rollers and half a tank of fuel so my buddy and I pulled the chain from the chain locker and flaked it along the side deck to see what difference it would make and wow! she was sitting level the interior cabinets were now level and the lower bobstay tang was finally out of the water, I cleaned it up best I could from the dingy and could detect some minor pitting where I assume it has been submerged for the past forty years, what is bothering me is that when I measured the chain rhode, it was 275ft of 5/16"bbb @ 1.10 lbs per ft., that seems like it should not have caused the boat to sit like that, the chain was led aft to a spot just behind the rope locker and I say was because the chain is now on the bottom of the bay (yes there is a retrieval line to get it back but I think it will hurt the boats downwind performance so it’s coming home by truck while the Fiddlers Green makes her way along the east coast from Maryland to Maine. How much chain do you carry? where is it stowed? do you need crew to flake it as it goes below pulling it aft?
Attached is a picture of her back in April sitting low in the water, her bilges were also full to the top of the tanks, pumped her out just in time.