LETS JUST PRETEND IT'S WARM

Our work has uncovered another serious flaw in the Prout Catamarans Escale design that was delivered to us: The hatch behind the traveler for the main. Instead of installing a hatch with a groove and a water drain, Prout Catamarans elected to save a minimal amount of money on our Escale and installed a "groove-less" and "drain-less" hatch instead. To date, this omission has cost us thousands of US Dollars to remedy and this hatch design could have very serious consequences for those that have the hydraulic steering ram mounted underneath, as the master drawings indicate. Ever inspect your hydraulic steering ram? Now may be a good time!

The maddening thing is how unnecessary this problem is. On the other hand it makes perfect sense. Every other hatch on the exterior of the boat had a groove and a "drain" that drained the water into the compartment that the hatch covered, not overboard. However, unlike the other compartments thus "covered" by hatches, the rear crash compartment had no drainage built into it. Thus, in order to avoid installing the kind of drainage we retrofitted, Prout Catamarans tried to seal a long rectangular hatch over a curved surface with only two dogs to tighten it down - good luck!

This hatch is bound to leak on your Prout Escale unless you either seal it permanently or install real drainage. Since we had experience retrofitting drainage elsewhere on board (see "drain" link above) we opted for the later. Much like the unconnected drain in our engine compartment, this sort of sloppiness by Prout Catamarans cost us far more time and money to fix than we could imagine initially.