In an effort to prepare for the upcoming sailing season, I have rebuilt the main companionway overhead hatch on our 32-foot sailboat for the second time. I may have finally found the solution to keeping rainwater out of my wife’s galley after battling with the problem for the past three summers. 

The original hatch, made in 1975 by Columbia Yachts, was already rotting when we purchased the boat. The water seeped through the exterior teak laminate and saturated the plywood inside. Eventually the 30-year-old plywood rotted away, and when it rained a steady stream of water fell from the mold-blackened underside of the hatch. My wife cried in anger when the drops fell into whatever she was making for dinner.

We got used to clustering pots and pans at the base of the companionway to keep the rainwater from ruining the teak sole. During the day our cat shifted them around and by the time we arrived home the entire sole was saturated.

With my first rebuild of the hatch I decided to incorporate a skylight into the companionway. It was similar to the original hatch (which exploded in a cloud of black sawdust when I cut it in half) in that I sandwiched a piece of plywood between some teak lumber. To add the skylight I removed a portion of plywood from the center of the new hatch and set in a piece of tinted Lexan plastic, using a generic seam compound to fill in the grooves where I thought water might try and get in. A little varnish, two teak handholds, and I had my wife convinced I actually knew how to build an attractive, watertight hatch.

 It didn’t take too many rainstorms to convince her otherwise.

The teak I used on both sides of the plywood was fresh from the lumber mill, so when it rained the boards swelled to the point of splitting the varnish and pushing out the seam compound. The entire hatch would expand a quarter of an inch, which was enough to wedge itself between the traveler and the deck so you had to throw your weight back or forward on the handles to open or close it. Once the boards dried they shrank back to their original size, creating wide gaps for rain to funnel through. Despite my attempts to fill the gaps with more seam compound and varnish, it didn’t take long before the underside of the new hatch looked as black and rotten as the original. 

We bought more pots.

After prowling around the docks of Casco Bay and inspecting other companionways, I decided to remake the hatch out of a single piece of three-quarter-inch thick clear Lexan plastic I had cut to size by a local distributor. In about 15 minutes I had the hefty piece of plastic on the hatch runners and the varnish soaked monstrosity was in the dumpster. 

During the past week we’ve been adjusting to the new clear hatchway, which sends daylight into what were previously the darkest corners of our galley. Yesterday, by force of habit I threw my bodyweight into the new hatch, which now opens with the push of a finger, and found myself in a heap somewhere by the base of the mast. My wife keeps stubbing her fingers when she reaches for the memory of old teak handles, and I finally decided to put some trim around the edges of the Lexan after our cat made what would have been a graceful leap from the galley countertop to the deck, but struck the closed hatch in midair and was sent sprawling to the sole.

A few bruises are a small price to pay to (hopefully) stay dry this summer.

                                               –Nate Jones