How to properly drain your Prout Catamarans' hatches

Another source of worry were the deck hatches. The Prout Catamarans drain system consists of a standard groove design with matching "lips" on the hatches. However, no overboard drains were installed into the grooves of four out of six exterior hatches (the engine and the diesel tank being notable exceptions). Instead, Prout Catamarans expects indentation in the groove lips to provide drainage. Naturally, this means that it rains into the lockers when its wet outside. Not the kind of environment you want to store anything in that is remotely corrodible.

Standing water is not beneficial to any structure I know, even if properly cured/gel coated fiberglass is relatively immune. But we don't even have fiber-glassed walls in the lockers, just painted wood with a tabbed fiberglass edging where the hull meets the plywood walls. This paint has been falling off the hull throughout the boat and hence provided little, if any, protection.

Thus, the exposed wood inside these lockers would have been prone to some sort of rot sooner or later. Furthermore, I do not enjoy the algae and other organisms that thrived in the OEM groove design (the hole in the wall was too low to allow all water to escape). The water is sucked into the fiberglass hatches as no amount of gel-coat can protect exposed, working edges indefinitively.

Thus, we installed hatch drains - modified ABS pipe to hose converters that were "dremmeled" to fit neatly into the groove. Epoxy keeps them there, and a dab of paint makes them disappear. Reinforced PVC hose then directs the water in the right direction. Eventually, I want them to drain into the bottom of the anchor well.

In this picture you can observe the OEM installed groove and "drain" consisting of a lowered inner wall alongside the new groove drains to the right. Eventually we will fill in the OEM "Drains" to ensure that the locker compartments stay relatively dry.

Here we are underneath the main anchor locker. The white guard prevents the anchor locker from being sprayed too badly when the boat slams into waves while the hole above empties the port fender locker. Note the uneven surface composition in the hole, showing many voids that could lead to trouble. We will fill those voids with a epoxy/glass-fiber paste.

Furthermore, we have to ensure that none of the supporting wood has rotted to the core. Given the quality of all hull penetrations, I fear the worst.