Rare bird - A Beneteau First 260 resource

You cannot imagine how gratified I am to see this picture. That is one of BlueJ's port windows after a torrential 3 days of rain, and NO LEAKS. Sadly she has been plagued by leaking windows from the day we got her, and my weak attempts to fix them always seemed to leak again. I finally buckled down and addressed the issue full on, and the result is dry cockpit cushions without the use of buckets! The first part of any battle is to know your opponent. In our case, the First 260 uses Lewmar OLD Standard Portlights, Size FOUR. The OLD is important, and so is Size Four. Lewmar produced these ports until 1998, so I assume Beneteau would have switched to the (new) Standard Port sometime after that. According to the Beneteau USA Spare Parts site, the cutoff was at Hull # 352. The key differences is in the latch, which does not penetrate the window, and the frame. More on that later. I discovered that leaks can come from several places, but the primary two reasons are worn or aged r

After 15 years of hard use, the starboard cabintop handrail on BlueJ began to crack. Partially because the wood was not properly treated on the bottom, and partially because of crew constantly clambering over the cabin-top to the new windward side. I tried to glue and screw it back together, but in the end it failed again. So I taped it as a stop-gap, and started to look at a new solution. One big issue I have with the construction on the First 260 is the manner in which the rails are attached. Not bolted but screwed into place with 4 SS screws, they could be pulled off under load. I HATE structural screws on sailboats. Happily, as far as I can tell these are the only screws used in the construction of the 260. They just happen to be in an unsafe place. In addition, because of the screws, removing the rails requires pulling off teak caps covering the screws, not an easy job and it damages the rails. It is the reason that a large abandoned mud dauber (a type of non-biting wasp) ne