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Changes in Latitudes...

Changes in Latitudes…

Evenstar has been sold. Our last view of Evenstar in the early Whangarei morning. Sobbing like a bereft child when I took this… Maybe some of you noticed it on the About page, but I’ve taken two+ months for me to get my head around it to write about it here. But we finally found a buyer and moved off the boat, and we’ve been back in the U.S. since December. More about that later. Oh sure, there…

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Of Failed Boat Sales and Mislaid Plans

Of Failed Boat Sales and Mislaid Plans

I’ve not updated the blog in well, forever, because life has been…mundane with not very much sailing. We’ve been in New Zealand since before the pandemic, and life here has been mostly normal since the virus isn’t out of hand. Weekly poker games, lunches with friends, boat work, and other typical non-adventures don’t make for high adventure and compelling blog content. We had a few interesting…

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When I first saw a Portland Pudgy at a boat show, I didn’t know what to make of it. But I came from that initial unflattering impression all the way to buying one and loving the boat.

This week, we bid goodbye to this trusty, well loved and used friend.

Our brand new Pudgy sitting on the shop floor, waiting for pickup.

We bought the boat over a decade ago to have a “kid’s car” for our two young sailors to be able to get off the boat and explore on their own. Though both kids liked the boat and used it, Will developed a passion for it and sailed it for hundreds of hours and over a thousand miles over the time he was cruising with us.

But he left for college in 2015,and now Danielle has been off at school for two years as well. Except for a few weeks when we had crew with us last year, the Pudgy was seeing little or no use.

Will graduated and settled into a job in Anacortes, Washington. He’s bought his own boat, a Capri 22, which he’s been racing and cruising all around his local waters. He’d love to have the Pudgy for a tender, and we’d love to send it to him. We’d hoped to sail Evenstar back to the U.S. and visit him in Washington.

But with our plans to sell the boat and our inability to leave New Zealand with the current global crisis, the odds of us making it to the U.S. before we find a buyer look slim. The Pudgy has been weighing on our minds; because of the deep emotional attachment to the boat we didn’t want to just sell it if we could get it back. But the cost to ship her back to the U.S. is nuts; even though she’s a solid boat, the cost to ship it to the U.S. is better saved for a new boat.

The other day though, I was walking down the dock with a friend and he mentioned he was “looking for a little rowing or sailing dinghy for his son.” His boy is about the same age Will was when we got the Pudgy.

The solution seemed obvious.

We talked it over, and we thought the idea of selling the Pudgy to another family boat with a young sailor was much more appealing than scrambling to sell her or give her away at the last minute if we found a buyer for Evenstar.

The second we took her off the bow and put her in the water, the Pudgy started attracting attention again. Will always got a lot of questions about the boat everywhere he sailed, and in this part of the world I don’t think there’s another one. By the time our buyers decided to go ahead with her, neighbors had already told me they wanted the boat if the first buyer didn’t!

Poster child.

There are so many good memories associated with this little boat for our family, and it will always be specially linked to our son. He’s sailed with sea lions, seen a sea turtle larger than the boat, handled it in 30+ knot squalls, gone on camping trips to islands, ferried friends around the harbor, and sailed, rowed, and power it so many miles. He was literally the ‘poster child’ for the Portland Pudgy, appearing on the boat on their web sight and product literature.

  As we bid adieu to the most-traveled Portland Pudgy in the world, we wish her new owner many happy future memories!

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If we’re getting this mushy and sentimental about sailing off the kids’ dinghy, selling Evenstar is going to involved ugly-crying.

Goodbye, Little Friend. When I first saw a Portland Pudgy at a boat show, I didn't know what to make of it.

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Teak Bungs in the Time of COVID-19

Teak Bungs in the Time of COVID-19

It’s been a while since my last bombshell update, but surprisingly little has happened. I mean, we’ve returned to New Zealand, put the boat up for sale, moved into a marina, and been locked down for a month.

But other than that, not much has happened. At least that’s what it feels like.

The world is on fire, but that’s a totally different story than what we’ve been up to. What we’ve been up to…

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Changes in Latitudes… We're mere weeks away from a return to the boat from a long, unwilling exile from home.

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Remember Those Plans?

Not long ago, it seems like yesterday, I was bemoaning the fact that our entire plan for the next couple of years had been completely shot down in flames. And I waxed poetic about the fluid nature of cruising and how you need to be flexible.

And we sketched out another rough plan – head to New Caledonia and maybe Vanuatu before coming back to New Zealand. Sounds good, right?

Wrong.

Turns out the…

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to New Zealand…more LOTR geek touring.

It started when Kathy an I went to Wellington for a day to fail to apply for our visas for French Polynesia. A visit to Weta Studios was always on our bucket list and we couldn’t go to Wellington without making time for it.

The Weta Cave

We had some initial disappointment when we learned that you can’t actually tour the Weta Studios. I guess hey’re always filming movies there and doing actual work. Instead, they’ve set up the Weta Cave tour, which is adjacent to the studios and intersects with some of the buildings.

It’s not a long tour – 45 minutes or so. But it you love movies – and in particular if you’re fond of the Lord of the Rings & Hobbit movies, it’s worth the time to take it.

We had no idea how many movies Weta had been involved with. Turns out I’ve seen over thirty of them.

Unfortunately you can’t take pictures on the tour, but they do provide some photo ops before and after.

      The techniques and detail work they do there is simply amazing.They have the ability to create or re-create almost anything with 3D modelling, composite construction and painstaking painting and fine work. They even have a sword-smith on premises to make perfect swords for closeups.

Of particular interest to us was that both of our children were using some of the same 3D design and modelling tools they use in house – a tool called Rhino. Will uses it almost daily in his yacht design job, and Danielle learned as part of her digital art and 3D modeling course at Bucknell.

The Second Road Trip

With all of our problems with Evenstar and us getting stuck in Tauranga waiting for parts to arrive, we decided to take Danielle and go on a road trip. We were frustrated waiting around AirBnBs and decided to just DO something rather than stew around the house and grumble about UPS and their inability to get a package through customs without punting it.

South to Wellington

Kathy and I spent one day in Wellington, and most of it was ruined by the pall cast over our failure in the French Embassy. We returned there with the boat for a week or so, but we didn’t really get to spend as much time seeing things as we wanted to. We knew Danielle would love Weta, so we decided to press on for Wellington and work our way back. We still had one of our crew members with us (Lauren) but she was departing halfway through.

So we took Danielle to Weta, then explored the town for some locations after an enormous breakfast at Americano’s with one of the best (read only, except for Denny’s) bottomless cups of filter coffee in New Zealand.

Mount Victoria & Flight from the Shire

Many locations around Wellington, both in the city and around it, were used in the LOTR movies (presumably some were used for the Hobbit movies too, but we didn’t much like those). Right smack in the middle of the city is Mount Victoria, a wooded park full of walking paths and trails with a stunning view from the top.

It’s also where they filmed a number of scenes around the flight from the shire, including the road scenes and the terrifying sequence where the Nazgül almost finds the hobbits as they cower and hide under the roots of a large, gnarly tree.

Most of this was filmed in Mt. Victoria park, though the tree was built and later removed so you can’t see the roots. But there still are trees like that along the paths, and you can feel the atmosphere and the lighting from the movie walking through the woods. The topography is obviously the same and  the dappling of the light similar even if it’s not so easy to find the exact spots since props have been removed and scenery restored.

The Hutt River

North of Wellington, the Hutt river was the site of several other scenes. One scene which annoyed purists like me (because it was 100% created for the movie) was when Brego the horse finds a sodden and unconscious Aragorn lying on the banks of the Anduin river. Aragorn dreams of Arwen Evenstar and imagines the horse starts sniffing his face and…

…it didn’t go the way it could have.

Our rental car’s GPS had a number of LOTR movie sites conveniently marked on the map for us. This location was on a very scenic river, with fast moving clear water and smoothed stone beaches.

The exact spot, as always was a little difficult to pinpoint. Rivers run higher and lower, and lever camera angles show you differences. But the GPS doesn’t lie…

Lower Hutt & Rivendell

Outside the town of Lower Hutt lies the Kaitoke regional park where many of the scenes in Rivendell were filmed.

The Greater Wellington Regional Council was wise enough to commemorate the filming and preserve it with several signs and plaques and maps which show where certain scenes were filmed.

The maps and posts and guides are more helpful than many of the locations which are barely visible any more. This one even had Peter Jackson! Even if his face in that kiosk is more evocative of Jack Nicholson coming through the bathroom door in The Shining than any of Jackon’s cameos in the LOTR.

  Many of the scenes like this were filmed on sets built in this area.

After the filming was complete, all of the sets were removed and the sites restored, as they did in every location. The trees are still there though, an someone left a scale model of an arch to leave as a reminder.

  Nerdvana IIa – Confession Time

If you read these posts, you’d think that between our last LOTR and now we’d done no other movie sites. That’s not completely true. In March of 2018 Kathy and I came to New Zealand for a week to clear out visas back in Australia and celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

While we were there, we visited Arrowtown and the Ford of Bruinen where the Nazgül almost catch an injured Frodo only to be rescued by the combined magics of Arwen (Glordindel, dang it!!) and Gandalf.

We also came really, really close to finding the canyon where the Argnonath was filmed, somewhere near the Kawaru Suspension bridge.

Anyone who has spent any time in New Zealand or around Kiwis wouldn’t be surprised for a second to learn that bungee jumping was basically invented, at least commercially, by jumping off this perfectly nice bridge into a terrifying gorge.

Anyone who has spent any significant time around us wouldn’t be surprised to learn that we never found the Argonath, but we did find Chard Farm winery which was quite delightful and distracted us from the mission at hand.

We don’t know how many more movie sites we’ll be able to take in. We’ve seen many of the ones you can reach without a helicopter. But it’s been a fantastic way to see New Zealand, because every time you look for a movie site you find three other cool things on the way worth seeing.

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Nerdvana III - More Tours of the Rings Just when you thought it was safe to go back to New Zealand...more LOTR geek touring.

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Firmly Etched in Wet Sand...

Firmly Etched in Wet Sand…

…below the high water mark.

That’s how I generally describe our plans and how we make them. But sometimes it’s nice to actually KNOW what you will be doing, and it is also required to know when you are applying for things like visas and permits.

The Original Plan. Sort of.

Once upon a time, we had a plan which was “Sail to Australia and New Zealand before Will leaves us for college.” We mostly…

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Four Days On the Way Back to New Zealand

Four Days On the Way Back to New Zealand

To date it has been a delightfully uneventful passage.

We don’t like exciting passages. We prefer deathly dull, unintersting trips were the sailing is easy, nothing major breaks, and there’s, as our Aussie friends are keen to say, “No Drama.”

A Few Things Acting Up

It wouldn’t be an offshore passage if a few things didn’t go wonky. The hose connection to the check valve on the water heater popped…

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Stay Glued to Your Screens!

Stay Glued to Your Screens!

Okay everyone, stand back… Evenstar now has hourly position updates on our whereabouts during passages.

For now anyway, because it’s a side effect of a bunch of other expensive stuff we’ve paid for for other purposes.

With out new and increased satellite communication with an Iridium Go, we have better access to weather data, e-mail, etc. at sea. But one thing this recent experience…

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OMAgerd, a Cyclone!

So…about that Sunday departure…

We’re still in Sydney. We’re likely to BE in Sydney for several more days.

Last Friday we headed of to Costco to do a provisioning run for the passage. First, we got up early and dropped both sails. We replaced the jib halyard, and inspected the main halyard but decided we didn’t need the new one yet after all. The jib went smoothly, but the early morning…

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Back in the Saddle Again...Almost!

Back in the Saddle Again…Almost!

We’ve been back in Australia for almost a month, and I’ve yet to update you all on…anything. My bad, but we’ve been so busy.

We’re finally getting ready to leave Australia, after almost two and a half years.

We’d only planned to be here a year, then reality intruded. The battery project ran over and we extended our visas. It took longer to replace our hatches than we planned. Then we…

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The New Zealand Honeymoon of Necessity

The New Zealand Honeymoon of Necessity

The original plan for our 25th anniversary was quite simple; I bought a pair of  tickets to see Book of Mormon at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney and started looking for a nice place to go to dinner. Danielle would tough it out alone on the boat while we spent a romantic evening doing something we’d not done in a long time.

Then we tried to renew our visas.

As it turned out we solved several…

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Some of you may have noticed that I’ve not posted in a while. The reason is simple – we’ve been off the boat since June and traveling. In the last two months we’ve left Australia temporarily and have been to the U.K., France, and a now the United States. Evenstar is laid up on a mooring in Oz, awaiting our return.

For us, it’s a time of transitions and changes as our children are growing up.

We’re Going to Need a New Tagline

For years, it’s been “Two Adults, Two Teenagers, One Boat.” When Will  left us to go to college we kept it, since he’d still be spending summers and vacations with us. When he was no longer a teen, we let it slide because he was still a part of the crew.

Now things are changing.

Yes, he apparently has gotten taller while he was off at school. It’s not just the hat.

Though Will will always be part of the crew in our hearts, he’s also starting his own life. After graduating from Southampton Solent with First Honours, he’s taken a job with Betts Boats in Anacortes, Washington – the same place he did an internship last summer. So for the foreseeable future he’ll be in the Pacific Northwest and we don’t know when he’ll be making a passage with us again.

Many of you have experienced this. It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for since they were born – to see them as full-fledged adults starting on their own successful lives. And you’ve viewed it with as much fear as joy, because you now things are changing forever and your child isn’t really under your wing any more.

The Nest Gets Emptier

At the same time that Will is starting his adult life, his sister Danielle is headed off to college.Since she’s been boat schooled, we don’t have any graduation pictures to share with you. But we’re dropping her off at Bucknell in mid-August. So we still get her for some summer vacations, but she’s headed off too.

We’d expected an overlap year with both kids in college at the same time, while putting off this empty nest moment another year. But the UK university system is a bit more focused that the American system, and Will’s Bachelors of Engineering in Yacht Design degree is a three-year program, not four. They don’t waste a lot of time on niceties like a “core curriculum” or “rounding out your liberal arts degree”; he started doing all yacht design all the time on day one and so is through a year faster. While it’s a nice bonus to our wallets, it feels a little like we got robbed of another year with him.

So we find ourselves poised at this moment a year earlier than we expected.

The Goodbye Tour

We’ve got a lot to cover on this trip which is why we’ll be off the boat so long. Graduations, new schools, new cars, moving, drivers licenses, and a whole laundry list of things we want to do and that we must do.

I promise in the future I will include more details posts on this since we have a lot of pictures and stories to share. It’s been a busy time. But for now, here’s the summary of the last couple of months.

Early June: Leave Australia for Southampton, UK.

Help Will get moved out of his apartment for about a week while seeing Southampton.

Mid June: Take a ferry to Caen France. From there we spent a few days touring the Normandy region before heading for the Loire valley

A week in the Loire Valley and Burgundy, followed by…

A week in Paris

On June 30th we took the chunnel train from Paris to London, where we met my parents for six days of London tourism.

Return to the Southampton area to a rented cottage in Hamble-le-Rice, where we were joined by Will’s uncle and his two cousins.

July 10th – Southampton Solent Graduation

July 15th – Everyone heads back to the U.S.

July 18th – Rent a car and drive from Virginia to Florida to visit Kathy’s father and her younger brother. Also we had a mad scramble to get Will a driver’s license.

July 27th – return to Charlottesville. Will buys a car.

Over the next few weeks we’re headed up to Rhode Island to see friends and family, then to Bucknell to drop Danielle off at school. After that, we pack up Will’s new car and drive cross-country with him to his new job in Anacortes.

Sometime around the end of September or early October we’ll be headed back to Australia. Just the two of us, headed to a truly empty boat for the first time.

It’s going to take some getting used to. The good news is, Kathy and I learned back in March that we actually still get along quite well when left alone. Another blog post I owe you – our surprise week-long 25th anniversary getaway to New Zealand (while Danielle visited colleges in the US) – explains all that. We had two weeks on our own, and we had a lot of fun together. BTW the “surprise” was as in “unplanned” versus “someone did something nice for us”. The only real surprise there was learning how much Australia would charge to renew our visas unless we left the country and came back…

So with some luck, perseverance, and a spiffy new laptop I’ll bring you up to date on some goings on since my last proper update.

In the meantime…I’ll tease some pictures, everything from Penguins to Paris!

Yes, he apparently has gotten taller while he was off at school.

  The Long Goodbye Some of you may have noticed that I've not posted in a while. The reason is simple - we've been off the boat since June and traveling.

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Our New Home...

Our New Home…

Well, for the blog, anyway.

After way too much difficulty over a lost tilde, I finally got all the files and databases moved over to pull the entire blog and all it’s history to a new hosting company. So GatorHosting.Com, here we are.

Please stay up.

If you’re curious about the tilde, it involved WAY too much time and too many tech support sessions to get a simple question answered – “What do I…

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Movin' On Up

Movin’ On Up

Sail Evenstar will be moving in the next week or so to a new host. So it may go offline or look weird.

Probably it will look weird, since I’m bound to screw something up. So be patient…

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Water, Water Everywhere

Several of our Lewmar Ocean Hatches have been a problem for some time now. Way back in 2011 as part of my preparations for cruising we replaced our crazed and cracked hatch lenses with new, shaded ones. Presumably new seals were installed, but we didn’t really address any other hardware at that time – the handles, hinges, and so on. They were a bit worn looking, but serviceable.

Over the last couple of years the main hatch in the V-Berth has started leaking. Not in rain, but when water would come over the bow offshore. This is a bad thing, since it floods salt water all over Danielle’s room and her bed. Over time, several more windows developed similar leaks, including the two smaller windows in the forward cabins and the hatch in the saloon. The saloon hatch was starting to take water in heavy rain, even. But we couldn’t take the boat offshore without kluging up some combination of hatch sealing type, while draping the V-Berth with plastic drop cloths and towels.

Obviously, this is not a good thing. The Ocean Hatch series are big, beefy hatches engineered to keep the water out, and were no longer doing their jobs. In addition, some of them were getting quite stiff to open. Visual inspection showed daylight visible between the seal and the metal rim. Culprit found!

Seal Failure/Failure to RE-SEAL

Hatches aren’t cheap. Neither are Lewmar replacement parts, but $150 for a piece of rubber is still less that $1,500 for a whole new hatch. Research into replacing the seals on this particular model showed me it was a nasty job, requiring the sort of patience and care that I don’t usually have. I decided to hired a professional, and was pleased when I found someone who could do the job properly.

I have a long standing motto with regards to boat projects and hiring people, which is “I can always fudge* it up myself for free.” This is from years of experience hiring tradespeople to do jobs I could maybe do and not being pleased with the results, as well as from tackling projects myself that maybe I should not have. But mostly it’s from spending money on dubious outcomes provided by “pros” to do jobs I really ought to at least take a whack at myself. After all, if I completely screw it up I can usually hire someone to bail me out, or just throw the part out and get a new one. Why pay someone else to ruin the project for you, when you can do it badly yourself for no charge?

I should, on occassion, pay attention to what passes for wisdom in my head.

I’m not going to mention names here, but hiring someone to replace the seals for us was an qunqualified disaster and a complete waste of money. In brief, the guy was unprofessional, showed up way late after keeping me waiting for almost two days, then did the most work at night in the dark, and didn’t follow my instructions too well. It was sloppy, messy, and he tried to charge me almost double what he originally quoted for doing less work than I initially asked for but more than I wanted.

The end product was so appalling that I’ve included samples. And get this…some of the windows now leak in light rain.

Seriously, if I wanted a sloppy caulking job that leaked worse than when we started, I could have done it myself. For free.

You can see just how deep the calking is here.

So much for saving money on this. After this little adventure we learned a few things. First, our seals were probably OK, the problem was more likely in our hinges. In the case of one of the big windows, the hinge had corroded enough so the hatch wasn’t closing straight. In some of the others the hinges were warping the frames, they were so tight to open. Of course, on one window the hatch “expert” didn’t bother to check for hinge problems until after he cut the lens out and destroyed the window seal – against my explicit instructions not to do so.

After we got rid of this guy we were left with hatches we no longer trusted to take off shore. Three of them because he’d mangled the seals and probably made the leaks worse, and two more that were either not fixed, or in poor condition.

Please Take My Money

There was some confusion about the size of my hatches when seals were ordered for replacement. The seals were the wrong size, no surprise given the guy that ordered them seemed a little clueless in the end. But it turns out it that our hatches are a “special” size. It’s not clear to me whether this was a custom size made for Hallberg-Rassy, or if Lewmar used to make a size 66 window in the distant past, and simply stopped making them.

But hatches to replace our large ones are simply not made or in inventory anywhere. They would need to be custom ordered and made. At some point in this process, we realized we might as well do all the hatches at once, since the two little ones were dmaged replacing the seals, and the three big ones were all pretty baked even before the seal guy touched one of them.

Further exploration turned up stock in size 66 hatches at Hallberg-Rassy, in Sweden. But they had clear glass and would not match the tinited windows. And clear lenses are probably great in sun starved Sweden up near the Artic circle. In the tropics they will roast you in your own personal greenhouse; you really want some tint in the lenses.

Then it started getting weird – we started getting quotes. One Australian vendor we talked to was insanely expensive for the custom order. Another was lower priced, but still expensive. Ordering them a place like Defender in the states and importing them ourselves could save money. It turns out the absolute cheapest option was to order the three big hatches from Hallberg-Rassy, and get the two smaller ones locally. Except we’d have to deal with Customs to import them ourselves and arrange local delivery, which may no have been worth the few hundred dollars we’d save.

Eventually I called my friend Phil and asked him if I could ship the hatches from Sweden to him. At his point he reminded me that he owned a company called “Deck Hardware” and he also sold hatches…and would I consider looking at a quote from him? Sure I said, thinking about where else I could send my Lewmar hatches.

So…more options. We got more information on the availability of Lewmar Size 66 hatches with “smoke” lenses (availability: poor) and more pricing. We got quotes back from Phil which were a tiny by higher, but his were made from 316 stainless instead of Aluminum.

We finally decided…we’d order ALL FIVE from the cheaper local supplier and let them deal with customs and importing. The Lewmars were an exact replacement though, and therefore zero risk about fitting in the boat. So I picked up the phone to place the order…

Your Money is No Good Here

I always wanted to hear that phrase, maybe after I’d saved the town from the bad guys or helped shore up a local pub against rising flood waters.

In this case though, they meant my credit card was no good here. Not because I didn’t have enough credit, there’s enough open limit on that card to buy a small car. But because my credit card is foreign. Even though I told the vendor I was an American and planning to pay by credit card a week earlier, they neglected to tell me they don’t take foreign credit cards, for no clear reason and insisted on a wire transfer for any “foreign” transactions, even though I am sitting in Sydney.

I’ve used this card over the last sixteen months for paying for everything from coffee to a new head installation that cost over $5,000 AUD. Never a problem. But this company wouldn’t even try to run it. I’ve explained elswhere why the credit card works so much better for us even when businesses charge a surcharge. It gets us out of foreign currency fees, wire charges and having to have a bunch of cash ready to transfer out to someone on a wire. We keep cash around for operating expenses, but most of our capital outlay money is less liquid than cash because it’s not impulse money. In this case, it would cut about a week or the ordering time, which with a delivery time of ten weeks for the hatches, is pretty imporant since we’d already been putzing around for two weeks just to get comparative quotes.

Did I feel like spending the next week liquidating assets, moving money, then arranging a wire to prepay this order with cash? No, I did not.

I called Phil and we took a bus out to his shop to look at those windows. We made a few modifications (added a 25mm lip around the bottom, and some locking handles) and he got back to me the next morning with revised numbers. If the Chinese New Year doesn’t mess with the supply line, we should have them in about 45 days. Yes, they’re more expensive than the Lewmar windows. I also think they are better, being 316 stainless instead of aluminum which we’ve had corrode on us. We’ll meet Phil at the Middle Harbour Yacht Club, he’ll drop off the hatches, then we’ll hoist a few cold ones up the bar. Problem solved.

Man Ship Hatch, courtesy of Deck Hardware

Schedule impact

This hatch debaucle has not been without effect. Our original plan after the new year was to sail down to Tasmania. It became quickly apparent that sailing off shore with dodgy hatches wasn’t a good idea. We’d hoped to rectify this by replacing the seals. As you now know, that was a disaster and made the leaks worse. And new replacement hatches were going to take 2-3 months to arrive, by which point it would be snowing in Tasmania again.

So Tassie is out. All offshore places are out. With luck, on a calm day with the wind behind us, we can make the sixteen mile trip back up to the Pittwater to get out of Sydney. But we’re not going anywhere we can get waves over the bow.

That’s a bit of a bummer, and spirits have been low over it. But…c���est la vie afloat. Things break, and you deal with them. Next time we head off shore we won’t need to put tarps all over the V-berth though, so that’s something.

The Hatch Horrors Water, Water Everywhere Several of our Lewmar Ocean Hatches have been a problem for some time now.