When I went to look at the boat I thought I had a good idea as to where the hull number would be. I could not find it. Even after getting it home and taking some more time to look for the hull number or ID, I still could not seem to locate anything that made sense. On Tuesday night I finally located the spot where the manufacturer drills a series of holes in the fiberglass indicating the hull number. Unfortunately what I found did not make any sense. It looked like a "0" with a single hole in the one o'clock position next to the "0". There were nine holes that made up the "0" for a total of ten holes. Did this mean I had hull number zero (maybe a prototype) or hull number 10 ?(since there were ten holes). Several sources including Blue Water Yachts, kept telling me to check out the transom, which I did, eight times. I just was not seeing anything there. This lead me to believe that the boat was pre-1974 since prior to that time Hull ID Numbers were not required.
I am a residential home builder and have several guys that I work with. for the rest of this Blog I will refer to them as "The Guys." Since virtually all my work is the block around my house, I can take advantage of down time on the jobsite and have The Guys work on personal projects. Yesterday, I had them clean out the boat. This included getting all of the pieces and parts of the boat out, so we could catalog them and see what we had. This also included vacuuming out all of the murky water and mosquito larvae that was in the bottom 8-10" of the hull. We also took the opportunity to put all of the fiberglass hatches in place to minimize additional rain water from getting back in.
It is amazing the difference that just that simple clean up made. the boat does not look so "skeletal" now. Don't get me wrong, it still looks very much like a boat project, but it looks much less like tennessee road side dump off. so that's good.
So after the general clean up I started looking on the transom again for the Hull ID Number. This time with more specific location in mind. Ray from Blue Water Yachts told me that I should look right beneath the rub rail on the starboard transom. I skeptically went back to look, knowing that i had already searched the whole transom and I was sure that I would not find anything new.
It was a great feeling, I almost felt like Indiana Jones (without the bullwhip) discovering an ancient artifact, when I started to realize that Ray was right. Barely noticeable, under layers of paint, there was the faint trace of numbers scratched into the hull of the boat. After a little sanding and rubbing I was able to get a clear picture of the ID. MAC04216M72B.
This was great news! I was now able to put aside my fears that maybe this was not a true Macgregor, and maybe someone just had a kit boat or something that was made to look like it. This number confirmed that this was a Macgregor hull (MAC) the hull number was 04216 and it was manufactured in September of 1972. You can check out www.wadler.org/boat-mac/hullid.php for more information on the hull ID.
Now the next step is to see what I need to do to get this baby registered. Before I start putting intensive time and money into her, I want to make sure that I can take care of titling and registration. This might be hard.
Speaking of registering the boat. Tricia and I were discussing possible boat names on the drive back. During the drive we were joking about the Allstate commercials with the guy that is always causing insurance claims and he calls himself Mayhem. Our conversation was revolving more around getting a t-shirt for Aiden (our two year old) that says " I am Mayhem." Then it hit me. With the condition that this boat is in, and the time and effort that I know it will take to get it alive again, it will be total mayhem. It seemed like kind of a cool name too. SO, I think we will be christening her as Mayhem when we finally get her back to water.
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