The Delta Charlie Kilo

For Those Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moments

The Delta Charlie Kilo (aka, the Damage Control Kit, or ‘DCK’ for short) is a dedicated set of tools and materials stored together and ready for immediate deployment. It’s basically a boat ‘first aid kit’ for those Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments. We have had one aboard Avant since we set sail over ten years ago and have never used it (thank goodness!), but we are glad to have it at hand.

The concept is that in an emergency scenario (e.g., hitting a rock or other hard thing) you might not have the time to get the right equipment and materials gathered to deal with a serious threat to your boat before it becomes fatal to the vessel. Having all the right stuff in a ready-to-go kit will speed your response and allow you to deal with it more efficiently, increasing safety aboard. No going back and forth to three lockers, moving other stuff and digging around for the right tools and fasteners, and trying to do this in the chaos of a true mayday emergency when you’ve already strewn the contents of a few lockers all over just finding the source of the water. With a suitable DCK it’s all right at hand, in a container to carry to wherever you need to use it.

The focus of the kit is to keep water out of the boat; other disasters at sea (e.g., fire, loss of rig, injury) are dealt with separately.

A one inch hole one foot below the waterline will admit about 20 gallons of water per minute (1,200 gallons per hour). A two inch hole one foot below the waterline will admit about 80 gallons of water per minute (4,800 gallons per hour). Bilge pumps rarely, if ever, achieve their rated pumping capacity (a test ^[1] performed by Practical Sailor found some only delivered about ½ their rated capacity), so even if you have multiple pumps with large nominal capacities, you will be hard pressed to keep up with even the smallest hole. Reducing the inflow of water must be the first order of business. If you can’t reduce the flow to a level below what your pumps can handle, you will lose your boat. Remember, you don’t need to stop the leak, just reduce it to a level your pumps can handle.

Various commercial kits are available (Seakits ^[2] is one supplier), but it’s easy enough to put together your own kit from things you may already have at hand augmented by a trip to a hardware store and a dollar store (few of the items are marine specific, so you will enjoy not paying the ‘boat tax’ for once).

We keep our kit in a cheap sealed container with a carry handle which has a lanyard and snap attached (in case we need use it on deck or need to transport it to another boat). Any portable container would work. You do need to refresh the contents every couple of years. The soft goods (tapes, glues, putties, sealants, etc.) go bad. The stuff inside is not first quality lifetime tools but rather rough and ready cheap hardware store, dollar store, or garage sale finds. The fasteners don’t need to be the best marine quality stainless or bronze; cheap galvanized or zinc coated steel is fine. These are not meant be more than temporary.

Our inventory includes some tools and fasteners, some ‘soft goods’ and some protective gear. Some suggestions include:

Tools:

• Big ugly pliers, one pair. Heavy enough to hammer with.
• Big ugly adjustable wrench. Also heavy enough to hammer with.
• An ugly claw hammer (for prying or, oddly, hammering).
• Big ugly screwdriver or small ugly pry bar.
• Multi bit screwdriver.
• A medium C-Clamp (4-6” or so, to provide an anchor point).
• Drywall ’frog sticker’ saw, or small folding hand saw with a stiff blade.
• A headlamp (bad things happen at night, too).
• Work gloves (one pair of leather and several pair mechanics plastic gloves).
• A cheap multi tool.

Soft goods:

• Strong light cord to tie things with, paracord, net cord, or similar (in 5-10 foot lengths).
• ~10’ of 1/4“ strong double braid line.
• Duct tape (peeled off the roll and make into a couple or three smaller rolls of ten feet or so, ends folded over so it’s easy to open. You can wrap it around a dowel or a plastic straw).
• A bicycle inner tube (used is fine) (can be stuffed in a crack, wrapped around a hose, or cut into gaskets).
• Flex Tape or similar strong sticks-when-wet tape.
• Self amalgamating silicone tape (Rescue Tape or similar).
• Pre-impregnated Fiberglass repair kits (JB Weld FiberWeld or similar).
• Gasket material (neoprene, felt, old blanket material, or a parts of a cut up dollar store yoga mat).
• A folded-up piece of a heavy-duty tarp.
• Toilet bowl wax gaskets (the cheapest wax-only ones, to tear up and press into leaks and cracks. You can strip these from their packaging to save space).
• A can of spray foam insulation (cures in or under water).
• A tube of Fast Cure 5200 (or other fast cure polymer sealant).
• Epoxy putty sticks (JB Weld WaterWeld or similar).
• A rag or two (to mop up water or plug a hole).
• A biggish chunk of sponge (to mop up water or plug a hole).

Fasteners, etc.:

• Some thinner plywood sheets cut to fit inside the case (1/4” or 5/16” is thick enough for this). You could also use cheap plastic dollar store cutting boards. Just needs to be sturdy enough to hold down gasket material (see above). Drill a hole in the center of these for the carriage bolts and/or toggle bolts. Drill some other holes to suit screws around the edges. Also some smaller pieces also with holes in the center, so you can use one inside and one outside a hole. These will be used with gasket material so the holes won’t matter too much.
• A few wooden wedges.
• Some thru hull plugs (simple tapered wood plugs, in case the ones attached to the thru hulls go adrift or to be used with wedges to pack a plug or gasket into a hole).
• A wire coat hanger, bent to fit in the box.
• A fistful of zip ties in different sizes.
• A selection of hose clamps from small to huge.
• Some carriage bolts (3/8” are easy to handle, about 4-5” long) with wing nuts and fender washers.
• Some large longer heavy-duty toggle bolts with fender washers (the kind with metal ‘arms’ that pop open after you push them through a hole).
• Some self drilling screws, 20 or so, about 2-3” long (stick these between two pieces of masking tape like nail gun nails so they can’t roll all over the place).
• If you have a wooden boat, nails (preferably ring nails) would be useful. In a fibreglass boat, not so much.

Of course, these can be augmented with other materials at hand (boat cushions, pillows, life jackets, locker cover plywood, cabinet doors, fabric, etc.), but these would be enough to get a heroic start on any grave issue.

There are various articles, videos and tutorials on the internet on how to deal with catastrophic flooding, some I particularly enjoyed were in Yachting Monthly’s ‘Crash Test Boat’ series (the whole series is worth watching, if only for the droll manner of the presenters when faced with the various catastrophic failures they engineered), which are available on YouTube:

Crash Test Boat is holed, part one ^[3]

Crash Test Boat is holed, part two ^[4]

Crash Test Boat through hull failure ^[5]

These show what really happens when a boat is holed, and demonstrate several different potential solutions (some of which work, some of which don’t). Personally, I prefer to learn how these situations can be dealt with without the direct experience of on-the-job learning.