Sinking houseboat

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Ryan said:
I don't remember the age, it was probably 10 - 15 years old, but very well maintained.

The insurance paid us what we had it insured for (much less than what replacement would have been), and then "exercised their option to not take possession of the wreckage". Which actually turned out ok for the group as I was able to sell the boat for $25,000, and someone re-built it, and it is back on the lake. It actually worked out ok for us, we didn't get as much $ as I would have liked, but the boat had too many owners and we wanted out anyway, and this made our decision much easier. All the partners went their own ways.

I think this story is probably pretty common, as there was a thread here some time back of an individual who did exactly that - rehabbed a sunk houseboat and had it back at Bullfrog in the slips. I think that boat is named "Serenity". Our old boat was re-named "Second Chances".

We never found out. It was an aluminum hull (maybe a Sumerset?). It went down within a day of being launched for the season. It was a comedy of errors between Offshore, Executive Services, and whoever was responsible to raise the boat. We never found out for sure what caused the sinking.
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It wouldn’t surprise me that a crack in one of the welds at a toon. The way Offshore would block up the houseboats is or was ridiculous. At least on ours there was no block’s in the center of toon’s for support. I would drive up to it and could actually seeing a slight sag in the center of the houseboat because of no support. We did develop a crack at a weld in the center of one toon. Ours was a play craft houseboat with foam filled toon’s, so we ended up having to replaced the toon’s.
 
Beachin It said:
It wouldn’t surprise me that a crack in one of the welds at a toon. The way Offshore would block up the houseboats is or was ridiculous. At least on ours there was no block’s in the center of toon’s for support. I would drive up to it and could actually seeing a slight sag in the center of the houseboat because of no support. We did develop a crack at a weld in the center of one toon. Ours was a play craft houseboat with foam filled toon’s, so we ended up having to replaced the toon’s.
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That blocking method cost our ownership group a summer on the lake. They could never fix leaks in one of the pontoons and there were structural issues all along the way. We had JNB completely redo both pontoons, giving them a good seal and added support structure to improve the viability of trailering and blocking without damaging the pontoons in the future. It cost a lot to do and nobody was happy to spend that much and still not get to use the boat for a summer, but in the end it was the right thing to do to prevent something similar from happening again.
 
Couldn't ever prove they were responsible for anything. They pulled the boat 3 times before May. Tried to weld and fix leaks in the pontoon. Their welder quit and they were relying on a very inexperienced welder. We lost confidence and every time they put it back in there were more leaks. Finally decided to have JNB fix even though he was projecting not getting done until July or August just because we had more confidence in him. In the end, he didn't finish until November if I recall correctly. We did more than just a simple repair though, sealing up the pontoons completely to allow pressure testing, replacing the black water tanks, painting the pontoons, adding support structure to allow better blocking in the future, etc.
 
Beachin It said:
It wouldn’t surprise me that a crack in one of the welds at a toon. The way Offshore would block up the houseboats is or was ridiculous. At least on ours there was no block’s in the center of toon’s for support. I would drive up to it and could actually seeing a slight sag in the center of the houseboat because of no support. We did develop a crack at a weld in the center of one toon. Ours was a play craft houseboat with foam filled toon’s, so we ended up having to replaced the toon’s.
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Our boat was an aluminum mono hull. No room to crack the weld.

And after it was recovered, it sat in the lot for a fair amount of time with a significant amount of water in the hull and didn’t leak.

There was more to the story but I digress.
 
Ryan said:
Our boat was an aluminum mono hull. No room to crack the weld.

And after it was recovered, it sat in the lot for a fair amount of time with a significant amount of water in the hull and didn’t leak.

There was more to the story but I digress.
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On a Summerset aluminum mono hull, it sounds like a transom seal on the outdrive. The seals on the water intakes (for motor cooling, slide or water filtration) come through the bottom of the hull, and if they were bad the water would have drained back out while it sat in the yard.

All the other through hull fittings for AC condensate, grey water, fresh water overflow, and the all important bilge pumps, are all above the waterline. In any case, it seems the bilge pumps were possibly switched off overwhelmed, or the batteries couldn't keep the pumps running.

Thinking about this gives me a case of the full body chills.
 
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