Checking for Moisture

[Roland Rodriguez]

Would anyone have any suggestions on checking for water below deck without going thru and lifting the deck. My transom was redone by the prior owner and its solid but I would like to have that warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not pushing a hundred pounds of water all over the fla. Keys. I was considering adding some inspection ports on both sides of the console that would let me reach in and inspect the foam. Big help from the pictures you folks posted while restoring your CCrafts, It gave me an Xray look at my boats inner workings. A local guru down here suggested taking the boat to a weigh station, subtracting the obvious, engine..fuel...gear... and getting an Idea of how much weight I'm hauling arround.
Any help will be appreciated. I'm trying to avoid the deck removal. sorry for the long post. thanks gang [img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

[JohnB]

Roland,
About the only non-invasive method I know is to use an electronic moisture meter. They work very well, but if you have bottom paint on the hull, you will have to remove some paint for the meter to work correctly (most bottom paints have copper in them). You can check for water in the stringers or transom by running the meter along the outside of the hull. It will detect moisture thru the glass.

[white hawk]

I like the moisture meter idea, sounds very accurate. My low tech approach was to drill a 1/4" hole near bottom of transom, insert a short length of wire and collect the water that weeped out. If you get a stream, you got problems.