"Spare" mounting holes for bow cleats

[KingsTransom]

I noticed there is a hole in the deck, half covered by the bow cleat foot, on each of the two bow cleats. The hole is on the inboard side of the frontmost foot. It must be original since there was no inspection port and all the original spray-in foam was in place when I added a port to fix the bow eye. The hole is big enough and deep enough to probe with a length of bell wire, which only goes in about an inch. Has anyone else seen this on their boat? I am guessing this was a design change to add a bigger cleat - they used one hole as-is, and drilled the second farther forward to fit the wider foot spacing. I assume it would be best to fill the hole with silicone to keep water out of the bow.

[jeadstx]

I have something similar on one cleat, but it is because of a repair that I did when I first got the boat. In the days before I found this forum and knew what inspection ports were. When I got my boat there was damage to the deck below the cleat.

Yours might be a previous owner replacing the cleats with ones that did not match the original hole pattern.

John

[GreenLake]

The side decks on my boat were drilled (by the factory) for hardware that was never mounted. The holes were filled by gelcoat, but are clearly visible from below the deck. (The gelcoat is a perfect color match, and a corresponding hole in the wooden coamings is missing, reinforcing the idea that this 'patch job' was done at the yard - either as part of customizing the boat, or in an attempt to use up a stockpile of decks that had been prepared for an older layout.

Lean production, six sigma, and quality circles were all unknown concepts when most of our boats were built...