Sea Sprite 23 #670 "Heritage"

[ebb]

My feeling is that the cousins Pearson knew pretty much what they could get away with getting a boat to market. Glass boats had been around for ten years by 1965.
I saw and corrected (but certainly not with your verve and craftsmanship) some amazing
short cuts and lousey joinery.
The factory got away with a lot of sloppy work in places where the customer would never look. At least not at first.

Ariel's cockpit is molded as part of the lid to the hull.
It is reinforced underneath the cockpit deck with widely spaced stiffeners of 1/2" plywood that are matted onto the woven roving laminate mold that is, from the molding standpoint, the top of the boat, stem to stern, side to side. Can't say that 1/2" ply strips pasted onto a flat surface really stiffens anything. But it does solve oil canning.

Crawling around under a stripped out hull I realized that on this Ariel the cockpit floated, wasn't supported anywhere from the deck down. Of course it is supported by its shell-like structure, but essentially the box of the cockpit and the seats and bridge are not attached to anything. It all hangs there. That's a bunch of unsupported flat, non curved, 'flexible' panels.
The seats are massive. The locker lids on the Ariel are almost 3/8" thick, more in places. NO flex allowed there! There is lot of glass and wood pasted in around the rim of the cockpit where the coamings get attached. It's pretty massive there, but except for the seats it's - how to describe it? -FLEXIBLE everywhere else. Found, for instance, that the ply bulkhead under the bridge isn't attached anywhere to the well. There is/was a variable 1/2" or so unaccessable mould & bug real estate hidden in there. Likewise the aft bulkhead was not attached to the cockpit!

Also noticed at the time that the fiberglass pipe rudder tube went STRAIGHT THRU the cockpit deck without a howdoyoudo of fillet or caulking that you could see from underneath. Or the top. You'd think there must have been something there to sell the boat, caulk, something to at least dress it up.... missing 45 years later.

I think Pearson was fully aware that the tube hole thru the cockpit couldn't be
built up and supported like the tube was at the other end coming into the hull.
The rudder tube in A-338 was well built up in a mass of stalagmite tabbing to the hull, but lacked any similar build up where it entered the cockpit deck. Why?

Can't believe they just forgot to caulk....
Maybe, that given the builtin flex of the cockpit structure, they didn't build it up under the cockpit because any movement of the cockpit as a whole could crack off the rudder tube at the hull!
That's a weak assumption I'll agree - but there has to be some explanation why these boats all have the same construt for a leaky deck rudder tube.
Can't second-guess the cousins.