The beginning

The project boat found me

November 2021. We had been looking at boats around $40K on the coast, and we figured there was no way to find something within three hours' drive. Then I found an Irwin 34 on Facebook Marketplace, on Lake Travis, for $5K, thirty minutes from home.

Long story short: project boat.

She was a 1978 Irwin Citation 34. A big project. Not total trash, but she needed a lot of love. People had been living aboard, and the cockpit was their backyard. An ugly RV-style air conditioner sat on the cabin top and blocked the whole view forward, so you steered like a WWII fighter pilot, looking only out to the sides.

The tour

Let's start inside, with the galley. More or less OK, until you lift things up. Everything that had been under cloth or other stuff on the countertop had rotted to nothing. In the locker behind the microwave someone had put a glass to collect the water. Very practical.

Then I took off the wall behind the microwave and looked aft over the ice chest. The bulkhead between the cockpit lockers and the cabin was rotted out, and there was a hole into the ice chest through the countertop. Surprise: no insulation on top of the ice chest at all. Two things let all that water in: the stanchion bases (every one badly made and leaking) and the deck drains.

Next, the front cabin. Not too bad? Well. The floor was gone. The plywood side panels were rotten, the planks hanging on finish nails stuck in paint. The headliner smelled like grandma's basement and was torn in places. The front lower shroud chainplate base had been "repaired", and the chainplate itself was made of several pieces bolted together. I had no idea how much glass went into that repair.

The head. The toilet didn't work. When I started checking it, it puffed about half a liter of old pee-poo right back in my face. A warm welcome. Everything behind and around it was rotten from the leaking stanchions.

The main cabin looked tired. You could see that water had stood on the floor for a while, so every floor panel had to go. The headliner was old and smelly. All the side panels were rotting, each at its own stage. The starboard bulkhead had been replaced, but the chainplates were leaking and it was getting wet again. Later I found out it was teak veneer on particle board, over 1/2 inch of plywood of unknown quality.

The fuel tank under the starboard settee was sealed with what looked like caulk over masking tape. A really strange technique. And here's a nice view of the bottom edge of a side panel.

The nav table was OK in general, but the wallpaper on the back covered rotten wood, and the side panel had to go. There were clear signs of water next to the icebox.

The port bulkhead was delaminated. There was a stress crack under the compression post: either the support under the liner wasn't enough, or there was too much load. A question for the designer: is that pocket there on purpose, so water can rot the bulkhead and the compression post faster? There was some white powder in it too. It looked like borax.

Wires, pumps and drains

Here's the low-voltage panel, and inside it. Then the 110 V panel, hidden around a corner, and inside that. Corrosion on everything, everywhere. Nobody here had heard of heat-shrink terminals. The original alternator turned out to be completely burned out.

A nice example of how the original wiring was done. And another good one. The engine wiring connector, after some cleaning. The antenna needed some love; I mean, help to retire. The deck light connection. The steaming light.

The manual bilge pump needed a full rebuild.

The deck drains were just tubes pushed into holes on some sealant, with no glass. All four leaked more water into the boat than they drained out.

The starboard chainplate slots weren't sealed properly, and a whole 2x6-foot piece of deck was soaked. I opened that up later.

The stanchion mounts had to be rebuilt. They weren't built the way Irwin's own drawings say. The wood blocks were too small, and the builder had just put a decorative cover over the bad work: one layer of glass over dry cloth.

At the port front lower shroud knee the plywood was rotten, and only two bolts held the chainplate, waiting for a good moment to let go.

And the headliner from behind, covered with every kind of mold you can imagine. That's why I'm always surprised when people ask how to clean that kind of headliner, the car-style vinyl with little holes. My answer: don't. Replace it.

The sump box was a "good" surprise. When the sump pump died, the previous owner didn't find anything better than drilling a hole in the box, so the galley sink drained straight into the bilge. Everything in the bilge was under half an inch of black, smelly goo. The picture is after cleaning, believe it or not.

Outside, she had been tied up for a while without fenders. There were scratches on both sides, mostly gelcoat deep.

The list

Before buying, I wrote down what I knew. The short version:

• Lots of water damage, the interior after two years of liveaboards.
• Port lower front chainplate anchor rotten.
• Stanchions leaking like hell. Ports old and leaking, one fixed window cracked.
• Deck paint 40 years old, but maintainable.
• Furler needs service. Main sail really dirty, lots of green.
• Under water: cracks around the lower rudder bracket and the cutlass bearing strut.
• Soft engine hatch with no seal.
• Broken pulpit, no place for an anchor, but three anchors on board.
• Steering block on two mounting points. Engine control mounted wobbly, on plywood, with loose screws.
• All shrouds tightened to the end. Lifelines really old.
• Fuel tank sealed over the top. The owner swore he cleaned it and sealed it with very good adhesive... we'll see. Level glass cracked.
• Broken nav light glass, one spreader light dead.
• Known dismasting history, the mast replaced with one from an Irwin 30.
• Starboard bulkhead replaced but not glassed to the hull. Port bulkhead delaminated.
• A crack across the centerboard.
• Lots of trash in the lockers, maybe something useful in there.
• Companionway doors need rebuilding. A strange drain hole in the anchor well going inside. Cabin sole water-damaged.

And here's what I found later:

• About 2 square feet of delamination in the starboard cockpit locker.
• Wiring done with bare copper wire, no heat-shrink terminals. All of it had to be replaced.
• Fresh water tanks no good for drinking water. The front tank had a hole drilled in the bottom.
• Engine alarms not connected. Engine air filter element removed.
• Steering quadrant wearing the cable because of bad adjustment.
• Rudder stock packing not compressed, just open.
• Fuel tank leaking through the laminate.

Day 1

The post about my first day was lost, sadly. It was a good one. Nine hours of digging stuff out of the boat. I cleaned the bilge and found that the sump pump wasn't even installed. The previous owner drained the kitchen sink into the bilge, so four of those hours went into cleaning that. The pump float mount wasn't attached to the hull either. I set it somehow, but it needs redoing.

I found a fisherman's anchor, an extra headsail, and lots of small things, some useful, some not. And one problem to fix ASAP: one clamp on the stuffing box was missing.

Day 3: the dock sank

I arrived in the morning, and the dock bridge had sunk. No way to get to the boat. After an hour of trying to pull the bridge out from under the dock and calling people on the other side, we found a dinghy, and around 11 I made it aboard. That left only six hours of work.

I cleaned the rotten plywood out of the galley wall cabinet and kept the frame to use as a template.

I checked how much water was around the chainplates: five test holes from inside, and about 10 inches was a void, with no core at all inside the deck. Then I measured everything that needed replacing: the opening and fixed ports, the companionway frames and hatch, the chainplates. It's all in my work notebook.

Then the bulkheads. For some reason the port bulkhead is two pieces joined with a solid wood strip and 10–16 wood screws, and the replaced piece is held to the liner with two M6-ish screws. It's in very good shape, but needs some work. The starboard one has minor damage near the deck, about an inch. Neither bulkhead is attached to the hull side, so the tabbing has to be redone on both.

Last came the sump box. The new pump fits, but I need to figure out the discharge hose: two 90° turns, about 0.9 inch OD and 0.6 inch ID. The sump box top is 13 x 9-5/8 inches and 0.17 inch thick.

That was the beginning. Everything after that is in the other stories on this site.

What I think of the Irwin 34

I moved this to its own page: What I like and dislike about the Irwin 34.

In 2023 I put all the old "before" pictures together on one page of the blog, "Beginning", linked from the top bar.