Mr. Fixit’s Update

Progress is being made on our repairs, but not fast enough.

We’d planned to be in Costa Rica some time ago.  Will was scheduled to spend a couple of weeks interning at Robert H. Perry Yacht Design (and see Bob’s blog in the blog roll) so we booked a flight from Costa Rica back to the states for him.  As the flight date got closer we realized we weren’t going to have everything back in time to get to Costa Rica safely.  So this week Will and I took a bus from Panama City to San Jose, Costa Rica and this morning I put him on a plane.  He should be there by Saturday afternoon, well after I am a few hours into my 15 hour bus ride back to Panama!

So of the things that are bedevilling us, we are working down the list.  The updates…

Sails

The sails came back last week.  They are ready to bend back on the rig, but the hydraulics aren’t back yet.  Unfortunately with Will gone this will be a lot more work.  We could put them on if the wind was light and manually furl them but I’d rather make sure all is well with the furlers before we give this a try.  Taking them off is a bear to.

Hydraulics, Part One

The hydraulic backstay and vang system is 100% on-line and fully functional!  The rebuild was very quick and reasonably priced.  The hardest part was trying to find a new inline filter in Panama City, I tried about five places and failed utterly.  A huge shoutout to my friends over at Sailing Anarchy and to Bam Miller at Oyster Bay Boat Shop especially, for taking the time to speak to me on the phone and answer all my e-mailed questions.

Professional hydraulic technicians handled the detail work rebuilding the hydraulic seals.  Our job was to pull the thing off the boat (a messy job…as it is full of hydraulic oil!), then take it back and reinstall it then flush and bleed the lines before reattaching the hoses to the vang and backstay adjuster.

Hydraulics Part Two

The furlers…still aren’t furling.  I did clean out the halyard swivel on the main furler, the part that was frozen and caused the main to tear.  Lots of flushing with fresh water and WD-40 removed some nasty looking chunks of stuff from the bearings and freed it up enough that it spins like it should.  I still need to grease it up but it is working again.

The hoses were a bit more problematic.  The factory hoses used bronze fittings (rust and corrosion resistant) and step in size from half-inch hoses to 3/8″ fittings on the furler gear.  Apparently this is a highly unnatural act in the hydraulic world and there was not a single 1/2″ to 3/8″ step down fitting in all of Panama. And certainly none with a 45 degree bend in them like we needed.

On top of it all the only fittings we could get in any size were “mild” steel.  On a boat there really is little place for mild steel.  You want stainless steel, or bronze or something resistant to corrosion.  The sea is a pretty toxic place for metals and they need to be tough.  However, these fittings are all inside the boat and not exposed to weather.

One other complication is the main furler hoses, after disassembling almost all the cabinetry in the bunk room we came to a wooden spot with no screws.  It was very firmly put together…but had no screws.  An inquiry to Hallberg-Rassy confirmed our fears that it was glued.  It wasn’t coming off without a crowbar.  So we decided to leave it in place.

So the plan…1/2″ to 3/8″ mild fittings were ordered.  We estimated the length of the main furler hoses and provided the other originals to be duplicated.  The plan is to replace the supply hoses and the Genoa furler hoses and keep the main hoses on hand as spares, rather than destroy all that nice mahogany doing a pre-emptive repair.  The original end fittings will be saved – they can not be reused – and shipped back stateside, where proper hoses will be built at leisure and sent to us somewhere in the South Pacific, some day.  We anticipate getting the hoses back Monday and install them shortly thereafter.

The Generator

This is the big problem child.  When the heat exchanger was found to be broken I went to the Parts Book for the generator that I keep on board.  I looked up the part number for the exchanger, checked for it on line and discovered the number had been “superseded” with a new one, then gave that number to the Westerbeke distributor in Panama City to order.

When the part arrived the technician was busy the next day, so he was scheduled to come out Saturday.  Well…he never showed.  Phone calls and e-mails on Monday, and he still never showed.  We got word there was a ‘problem with the part’, in that the technician did not think it would fit.  More phone calls and e-mails on Monday when he was supposed to come, and he didn’t make it.  Lather, rinse, repeat on Tuesday.  By now he was supposed to come out just to verify it was the wrong part.

Finally, Wednesday afternoon he made it out.  Much head shaking and phone calling ensued.  Also a lengthy conversation with Juan and myself conducted mostly through my iPhone and the magic of Google Translate.  The verdict?  Even though it looked to me like it could fit, it was smaller than the original part.

So we had to order a new part.  Expedited.  And pay to return the wrong part, which is more expensive than shipping the expedited part from the U.S.  Now we wait for parts again.

Freezer

The leaking freezer just keeps getting topped off with refrigerant though I am not having much luck finding any more refrigerant when my last can runs out.  I’ve ordered tools to help find the leak and books to teach me how to fix it they won’t be in for a couple of weeks.

We’ve had problems with growth in the raw water intake for the freezer.  This intake is shared with the aft head.  So if the intake is closed with crispy critters not only does the refrigeration overheat but you can’t flush the toilet without putting water in it with a bucket or the shower head.

The general solution to this is get out the snorkel gear and a metal clothes hanger and dive in, then poke, stab and twist between breaths until the water starts flowing again.  Last week though the wind picked up and came from a different direction.  The net result was lots of bouncy chop with really murky water full gross floating debris from the city.  When the boat is bucking up and down like that you really don’t want to be under it.  Even if you don’t crack your skull and drown all the other unwanted hard growth on the dirty bottom will cut you to ribbons.

The solution?  Take an extra length of hose and plumb the refrigerator/toilet system into the intake for the air conditioning.  It’s not like we can use it anyway without a generator, so why not?  That through hull was clean and everything came right back to the way it should be.  I’ll clean the original intake when it’s more calm and the water isn’t so gross.

Toilets

In the middle of all this, of course it was time for the toilets to act up.  Nothing...too gruesome, mostly, but annoying.  Ours was back flowing.  There is a valve called a “joker” or “duck bill” in the waste outflow line, the purpose of it is to ensure the flow goes one way…OUT of the toilet, not back in.  Given that we live on the sea and use salt water to flush, you get buildups of things like calcium scales and other impurities in the sea water.  The deposits can eventually foul the joker valve and keep it from closing, the result being things come back in the other way.   If you are good about keeping all the holding tank valves closed, well what comes back isn’t too awful since it’s just the little bit in the hose between the toilet and the tank.  But if the tank is full and you leave it open that can get pretty gross…lets just say the level of the tank is above that of the toilet and leave it at that.

Typically you treat the buildup with acid, you flush in a mixture of dilute muriatic acid will loosen up the deposits and things will start staying where they belong again.  This time it didn’t work.  For some reason the joker valve deformed and needed replacing.

On the other head, the toilet it was in dire need of a permanent re-lubrication and was squeaking so loudly the kids would wake each other up in the middle of the noise with the racket and it was hard to flush.  In addition the seal at the pump handle appeared to be leaking slightly.  Slightly is barely OK, but you want to fix this before it becomes more than a drip because there is no guarantee what is dripping is particularly sanitary.

Sunday morning – Sunday always seems to be my toilet fixing day – I clad myself in rubber gloves, flushed everything clear and sorted both of them out.  Just because I didn’t have anything else to do, ya know?