Hello all. I have a 2003 Bavaria 44 that I live aboard in the Pacific North West of the United States. It's been a remarkably dry boat for me after I changed all the window seals but I have a persistent leak in the forward cabin.
The water is coming in on the port side behind the cabinets at the first stanchion back after the bow rails and dripping down behind the liner and eventually below the edge of the mattress on the birth. I have isolated it here as best I can by filling the entire cavity between these cabinets and the deck/hull with wadded up towels both at this location and forward and aft of this location and waiting for it to rain. The towels wadded up in and around this stanchion always get wet but the ones before and aft stay dry. I have paid careful attention to where the wiring comes through from the sail locker forward of this position and the water does not appear to be coming from here. At least not directly as it would certainly have to get passed the wad of toweling and yet that toweling remains bone dry while there has been substantial water penetration further back at the stanchion. I have attached pictures of inside and outside showing the location.
So far in an attempt to fix this I have removed the teak toe rail from both above and the side strip. All old adhesive and sealant was carefully removed from above and all of the hardware (Stanchion, pulleys) were re-bedded with butyl tape. We cleaned all of the screw holes and removed and re-bedded the counter sunk deck-hull joint screws with butyl tape. Butyl tape was used anywhere a screw passed through the deck and the screws themselves coated with UV4000.
On the outside at the exposed deck hull joint there was some evidence of rotting sealant. All of that was carefully dug out. Some good sealant was likely removed in this process. Some water was found in here and we allowed it to dry well before re-sealing with UV4000 and reinstalling the outside rails. We didn't skip any step and I literally spent dozens of hours carefully removing all the old sealants. If I didn't do a good job here, I have no idea how I could have done better. I'm not ruling out a skill issues as I'm not an expert at this stuff but I guess what I'm trying to communicate is I didn't rush any of this work.
So far my only remaining theory, and really it's kind of a guess is that there is a channel rotted out in the deck hull joint, further back from the edge than the area I dug out and water is running down it, probably from further forward, until it finds a place it egress in to the cabin at that stanchion point. Perhaps the digging out of the old sealant worsened this and since it's a channel, just resealing the outside edge didn't fix anything. It's really just a theory and the problem is I'm not certain how I would even address this without separating the deck from the hull and completely removing / re-sealing the whole joint. That's not really something I can take on reasonably.
Is there a more reasonable way to address fixing something like? Does anyone have any experience or ideas they'd care to share with me? I'm kind of at my wit's end with this.
None of this had helped. If anything, it's getting worse. It used to require a fairly substantial rain to get water in the cabin
