Well THAT Was Interesting

On Mar 30th, 2014 Published By B.J.

We’ve taken the mast off of Evenstar before.  A couple of times in fact.  When storing on land in the winter her mast is so tall that the windage is dangerous, so to avoid shaking, rattling and damage to the boat we pulled the mast when we did it.

It was pretty easy.  They yard told me “high tide is at 11:30, show up about two hours or so ahead of time.”  I’d bring the boat into the yard, drive it into the “Pit” where the crane could reach the boat and then…the mast would come off.  I’d have to do a few prep items like take the boom off if I didn’t want to pay to get them done, and I might have to disconnect some wires first and reconnect them later – but the yard pretty much did all of it.  They undid all the shrouds and standing rigging, hooked up the crane.  I tended to bring the boat and leave it, then come back after lunch and go find where they’d left the mast for me to work on.

This time, in Panama, it wasn’t quite like that.

We decided to work with a rigger named Mike, a really nice expat from New Zealand living here in Panama.  He’s done this sort of stuff before, though he admits this is kind of “the heaviest” mast he’s pulled.  But it turns out that Mike and the crew of Evenstar got to do a lot of the heavy lifting on this mast pull and re-stepping.

We started last Sunday, when we took down the remaining sail and Mike came out to the boat and we pulled down the radar, took off the boom, and loosened a few things up and made an action plan.  Monday morning we brought the boat to the marina and the fun began.

With sixteen foot tides, timing the tide is a lot more important here than it was back with the puny four-foot tides we used to stress over back in New England.  We arrived two hours before the tide, at 8:00 in the morning, raring to go so we could pull the mast on the rising tide which peaked at 10:00.  So we hurried up…and waited.  This is, after all, Central America.  And I guess it is no big deal to put a boat in the Pit that needs four feet of water at the peak high tide while we waited and waited.  We finally got in after 11:00 when the tide was on its way down.

Now, we were racing the clock.  By the time we got into the pit where was about four feet of water left under the keel; the tide here moves 14-18 feet in about six hours so we estimated we had at most two hours before we were bumping the bottom.  So the disassembly crew set to work.

Back at Brewer’s Marina in East Greenwich the “crew” was all the pros that work in the yard.  Here in Panama we ran Mike up the rig to tie on the strap to the crane.  The crane is run by yard guys but it was Mike, Will, Danielle, Kathy and myself that were running around with wrenches, crowbars, pliers and PB Blaster getting all the standing rigging off.  You kind of want to do this in some semblance of order to keep the rig from escaping and of course not everything came off easily.  We are fortunate that we had the rig down in 2012 as most things were pretty easy and nothing was fatally stuck but it was a frenzy of activity.  Eventually, before anyone was ready for it or expecting it the rig swung free in the crane, almost smashing through the windows in the dodger.  I suspect the crane, which was fixed in place, had the boat dropped out from underneath it as the tide was plummeting down and raising the mast butt from the fitting on the deck. 

With the rig off the boat we had to divide and conquer.  I needed to stay with Mike and make sure the rig was handled properly and placed where we wanted it.  The boat needed to get back to the anchorage since there was no room for us in the marina.  This meant that for the first time ever Kathy and the kids had to move the boat without me on it.  Kathy was nervous but Will did a stellar job getting the boat backed off the dock and out of the marina.  Anchoring it was the easy part, though no one thought to get Mom a paper bag to breath into in the marina.

In the meantime…Mike and I got lunch.  It turned out that the second the rig was off the boat all the yard guys except the crane operator scattered like startled quail because it was lunch time.  So the crane was running (with the meter running too at $185/hour) to hold the mast in the air while everyone had lunch.  We didn’t find out what was happening until we asked why the rig was still in the air, there not being much to do we went and got some food ourselves.

After lunch the rig was very quickly settled on temporary stands as the workmen figured out how they were going to move it to the spot it was to sit while we worked on it.  After an abortive attempt with a backhoe that neither Mike or I could figure how they planned to work it, the crane came back and picked it up as we guided it to its resting place.

The next few days were Mike and I working on the furler, another fellow replacing some soldering I screwed up on the VHF antenna when I installed it, and me fixing a few other items included some stuff that got mashed up when a boat going through the marina waked us and made the mast slam into the crane on the way out.

After a false start Thursday and a cancelled mast stepping we returned Friday at 11:00 to catch the rising 2:00 p.m. high tide.

As you might guess, we did not get into the pit until after 2:30.  Things…happened, including of course the immutable lunch break and we once again went to work on a falling tide.  At least this time we were earlier and the tide was a higher one.

So going back in we reverse the process.  All four of us gather with a few yard guys to handle the mast as the crane carries it in the air through the yard.  It is placed on the ground for a few final attachments and checks, then strapped to the crane in a different location with a control line at the base.  To move the mast one attaches two straps like a bridle over the center of gravity.  To get the mast in the air and on the boat a single strap well above the center of gravity is used so the mast will tilt up when lifted.

Then the real fun begins.

Now, it is important to remember that you have a Kiwi and a Yank calling the shots together here, to a crew of Panamanians with very little English.  The supervisor speaks very good English, but not the crane operator.  And the crane is LOUD, so there is much shouting, hand waving, pointing and demonstrative gestures.

The objective is to get the rig onto the boat without hurting anything or anyone, then get sufficient standing rigging tied to it (the cables and wires that hold it on) so the crane can be removed.

Will, Mike and I gathered around the base of the mast when it was lowered to the deck in order to line it up properly on it’s seat.  Evenstar’s mast is Deck Stepped, meaning the mast rests on the deck of the boat with a compression post underneath it to take the weight and compression loads.  A keel stepped mast has a hole in the deck the mast passes through and the butt of the mast rests on a plate on the bottom of the boat.  Fortunately we did not have to thread that needle, it was hard enough to get this mast down since the crane operator seemed to struggle to get it straight.

We went around and around for close to an hour, moving the mast base around and connecting things to the boat where we could as the tide dropped beneath us.  A few times the mast was placed perfectly but got lifted out of position because the boat was dropping so fast.  Many requests to move the mast up or down “muy pequeno” or to try and straighten it more are passed back and forth.  Many rapid conversations in Spanish bounce around, but we finally we got enough shrouds and stays connected to hold the mast on.

It wasn’t held straight and it wasn’t held well, but with enough connections on the mast will NOT fall off even if it flops and wiggles and bends with every puff of breeze.  We quickly disconnected the crane then moved the boat to a nearby dock to tighten things down while I went off to pay for the crane.

At the end of it, it was the five of us getting the mast installed onto the boat.  And that was pretty cool to do, as the yard guys looked on and my kids helped fit cotter pins in place, bend off clevis pins and tighten turnbuckles down.

We still need to tune and straighten the rig some more, reconnect and reinstall a few more things and put the sails back on.  But we’re a SAILBOAT again and it feels pretty good.

I wish I had more pictures for you all, but we didn’t have any spare hands to take any!

Posted in broken things, excitement, Panama, Sailkote, scary | Comments Off on Well THAT Was Interesting

The Main Problem

On Mar 27th, 2014 Published By B.J.

This has been an extremely difficult post to write and I’ve been putting it off even though we’ve been aware of this problem for some time.  It has been hard not because the awfulness or severity of the problem (but it is severe, awful and expensive), but rather how the sheer stupidity of our handling of it has messed up our schedules and caused us so much trouble.

There is a takeaway to all this – when you have a problem with a major system that you know about, you fix it right away.  Even if it seems wildly inconvenient, even if there are other things pressing and it seems like a minor problem.  Because you never, ever know when a seemingly small problem can turn into a larger, more expensive and time consuming one.  Not that you can minimize the problem per se, but you can buy yourself more time to fix it.

Back up if you will to last November, when Evenstar was making her way from Trinidad to Panama by way of Aruba.  On the Panama to Aruba leg, as the trade winds died and left us near becalmed, we decided to furl up our sails and motor the rest of the way in as there was no wind to speak of any more.  As we went to do this we had some trouble bringing our main sail back in.

This is not terribly unusual.  We have what is known as “In Mast” furling on our main sail, where there is a large spindle running inside the mast that the sail wraps around.  The whole sail is sucked into the mast through a narrow slot in the back side of it as this spindle rotates.  I say this is not unusual because  in-mast furling systems are notoriously cantankerous; since you are sending a huge sail through tiny slot to be rolled up tight in a confined area it is important that you have everything tensioned “just so” so there are no bunches or folds that can get things jammed up.  We’ve obviously done this many, many times and usually it is pretty smooth – but having troubles isn’t unheard of.

If you’ve been keeping up you will recall that when we left Trinidad we had some trouble with the main sail and had to remove it from the boat for repairs.  Removing a sail is a prime chance to introduce a tensioning problem that can muck things up when we try to furl it in.  Generally when we get a Bad Furl, we wait until we arrive at our destination then on the first light wind day we unfurl it and re-furl it up to get the tricky folds out.  In arriving in Panama we couldn’t do this right away since we went into a slip and did not anchor out as we generally do.  To furl it properly you want light wind with the boat facing into the wind and at the dock this rarely occurs.  So we decided to wait to deal with it when we were on a mooring on the other side of the Canal.

This was where the Stupid begins.

In delaying dealing with the problem you let the focus on the problem get lost.  Since we were expecting nothing more than a few misplaced folds and bunched up sail cloth to work out it didn’t seem tpo pressing.  When we arrived at Balboa Yacht Club we were more focused on our visiting friends and then preparing the boat to be left for a couple of weeks when we traveled to the U.S. over the holidays.  With limited light wind days to deal with it the problem fell further to the way side.

It had been our plan all along to remove our sails in Panama to get some work done on them, each sail needed some minor repairs or upgrades.  When we returned to Panama we moved the boat from Balboa and immediately discovered some serious problems with the generator that consumed our time and attention.  It wasn’t until February that we looked once more at the sails and the attention they needed as we had other distractions to deal with as well.

We tried to open the main sail and we could not get it to fully unfurl and it jammed in place and would not furl back into the mast either.  Drastic action was needed, we looked from the deck with binoculars and saw that it was jammed at the top so Will volunteered to take a trip to the top of the rig to check it for us.

View from the top of the mast

Will looks down from the top of the mast

The top of Evenstar’s mast is about seventy feet over the water;  I hear the view is spectacular from up there.  But what Will saw was a main sail all jammed up and bunched into the top of the mast.  It would not move to unfurl.  We sent him back up with a hammer and some tools and he managed to knock it loose so we could fully unfurl the sail and drop it to the deck.

IMG_1287

A bit of a tear

When we got the sail down we spotted the problem – the head of the sail was tearing away from the luff rope.  This rope is what slides into a groove in the furler to hold the sail in place.  Seeing the damaged head of the sail we were slightly annoyed since the sail maker in Trinidad told us he fixed the stitching up there.  We weren’t expecting problems with a just-fixed sail.  But we figured this was why the sail and furler was acting up, and as the sail was headed to the sail maker for other repairs so no big deal.

If only we’d thought to ask ourselves WHY the sail would rip like that right after it had been reinforced.  But we missed that one too.

The sails came back a week or so later than expected but not too late.  We set them on the deck to await a calm day.  By this time Will was back in Seattle doing his yacht design internship and it was just Kathy, Danielle and me left to wrestle the sails back on.  The Genoa weighs more than either of them, and the main is only a bit smaller so a near windless day is pretty necessary to get them on short handed.  This took a bit of waiting, and we needed to get to Costa Rica to meet up with Will and my parents so when we found a day we started to put the sails up.

The Genoa went up with surprising ease, Danielle showed us how tough she was by doing the lion’s share of the cranking to haul the 135 pound sail to the head of the mast.  It went quickly and took less time that we expected so we moved right on to the main.

That is when we discovered The Main Problem.

Oh, the sail itself was fine.  But we we tried to move the furler into position to reinstall the sail onto it we discovered the REAL reason for our furling problems – the halyard swivel was near frozen up.

The general idea of a Furling system is to roll a sail up like a window shade for easy storing and deployment.  To do this the center extrusions the sail attaches to must rotate like the bar in a window shade.  The sail also needs to be attached firmly to the boat at the top and bottom.  These attachments must be able to rotate with the sail when it is wrapped.  So the Halyard Swivel is a device that attaches to the halyard that raises the sail has a drum with bearings in it, the sail attaches to the bottom of the drum.  The drum spins with the sail as it rotates, allowing the halyard to stay connected and not wrap itself around the sail with the sail rolls up.

Our halyard swivel wasn’t moving.  It should spin easily by hand with the sail isn’t on and ours wasn’t turning at all.  With the hydraulics one we could make it spin but with much noise and grinding sounds.  Pretty clearly the bearings were jammed up.  After spending time cleaning out the bearings, flushing them and lubricating them the problem got no better so we reached out to the local Selden dealer in Panama.8026

The dealer spent a few minutes looking at the mast, agreed with my assessment that the halyard swivel was “basically toast”, and we worked out a plan to get one quickly and get it installed so we could have the boat in order before my parents arrived.  The parts had to come from the Selden supplier in the U.S., but with help from Fedex it should have been doable but for some mistakes on the local suppliers part.  The ship deadline was missed for reasons that were entirely avoidable and we got the parts the day before Will and my parents arrived back in Panama.  We’d long abandoned going to Costa Rica by this point – everyone just changed their flights.  We weren’t about to tackle this with my parents on board, so we really lost two weeks or more with this mistake.

Returning from a visit with my parents I decided to run with a different horse to solve our troubles and contacted another rigger.  Unfortunately the tides were poor the week we returned from Las Perlas and we had to wait until this past Monday to fix the problem.

We needed the tides because the Halyard Swivel is inside the mast, there is no real access to it except through some small holes near the bottom of the rig that are not big enough to remove the swivel.  And it needs to go onto the rotating extrusion which can only be done from the bottom of it.  So the mast had to come down which meant bringing the boat into a yard, hiring a crane, and setting up the mast to work on.  Since the mast weighs in excess of a ton this is no small feat.

So on Monday…down it came.  It is sitting in a yard near us where the rigger and I have worked on it all week.  Today we finally got the main halyard swivel back on and the mast reassembled – we also opted to replace the head sail swivel since it was acting up but not frozen yet.  It’s been a dirty, sweaty expensive process with a with a lot of hard work to get it ready but we should have a mast back on tomorrow.

Just in time for me to go throw myself on the mercy of the bureaucrats at Customs and Immigration to deal with our visas and paperwork that expire this weekend…I need to buy us a few more days to get ready to sail West!

Posted in broken things, hard to find parts, Panama | 2 Comments

An Escape to Las Perlas

On Mar 18th, 2014 Published By B.J.

After weeks in Panama City trying to get the boat prepared to cross the Pacific we needed a break. We’d been tiring of the difficult dinghy situations, constant soot on the boat from the city, and discovering new things to fix or replace. It’s been quite some time since we’d been someplace fun with clear water!

As it happens my parents were coming down to visit for a week. Will had also been back in the U.S. doing an internship in yacht design and everyone was arriving on the same day. Originally we’d planned to meet everyone in Costa Rica, but some additional repairs needed in Panama ended those plans and everyone redirected flights to Panama City instead.

About 30 miles from Panama City lies the Las Perlas archipelago, a group of over 100 largely undeveloped islands with clear water and air. We’d been hearing about these islands for months and were quite jealous of friends that had escaped the city on occasions while we were laboring with broken generators and tracking down parts. So once we had collected all of our travelers, off we went!

The trip to the islands was spectacular. We spotted several whales on the way – a pair of Minke whales and what we believe to be a Fin. Frigate birds, pelicans and the occasional booby accompanied us the whole trip, and we were even treated to a visit from a small pod of dolphins. By the time we were breathing the clean air and admiring the sparkling waters off of Contadora island our spirits were much restored.

It is true there is not much out here. I am posting this in via Single Side Band, as we’ve not been near a Wifi signal or reliable cell tower for four days (that also means you have to wait for the pictures). We’ve had as many as two other boats in our current anchorage. But it has been lovely.

Our first stop was at Contadora island, one of the more developed islands in the archipelago. “Developed” in the sense that there are actually roads, houses, and some small resorts. It still is a very small place with not much more on it than a little shopette and some small restaurants and water sports concessions. There are lovely beaches, however we found the water there contained some sort of small stinging creatures so we didn’t do a lot of swimming. We suspect this was a short seasonal outbreak as we talked to some people that were here a day or two previously and they didn’t mention anything.

After a two nights at Contadora we moved down the East side of the island chain to Isla del Espiritu Santo, an anchorage between the aforementioned island and Isla del Rey, the largest island in the group. While Isla del Rey is the largest island by far, it isn’t the most developed. There are four villages on the island, the cruising guide characterizes one of them as “having a phone” so you can sort of guess they are pretty remote.

This is a stunningly beautiful and remote spot. The water is clear, but not quite crystal – we suspect because of some nearby rivers and mangroves. At low tide numerous beautiful sand beaches are uncovered. Fish and birds abound here, and the occasional local fishing Panga makes its way by. There are no buildings, no roads, to cell towers. At high tide we took our dinghy exploring up the little river into the mangrove jungle. Ibises, fish, and bird calls were the only things breaking the silence as we paddled the dinghy quietly up stream.

Today we are leaving this idyllic spot to head back to Panama City to say goodbye to my parents and get back to work. But we’ve enjoyed being able to breathe the clean air and admire the beauty for just a little longer.

Posted in Panama | Comments Off on An Escape to Las Perlas

Dinghy Dock Casualties

On Mar 1st, 2014 Published By B.J.

A few weeks back I posted about the horrible dinghy dock here at the Las Brisas anchorage.  Although much of that post was tongue in cheek it is possible I underestimated the nastiness of the situation.

A couple of days after that post I slipped on the dock.  I was not seriously hurt, but it could have been worse.  One of the steps on the stairs slopes down, and in bare feet I started sliding down the steps.  I tried to grab another step, anything, to stop my motion and could not.  At one point I was splayed out like Spiderman on a wall, sliding down towards the water as I scrambled for purchase.  Eventually I found it, fortunately before the water reached the pocket where my cell phone was.  When I was able to scramble to safety I was bleeding from about dozen cuts and scrapes from my knees to the bottom of my feet.  I took a picture, but I decided not to put it here.  Minor injuries and annoying, but with the dirtiness of the water here you have to make sure you clean everything well.  Nothing worse than having to wear socks for a day to two to keep things clean.

That wasn’t the big casualty.  The big casualty was the dinghy.

Last week I took a bus with Will to Costa Rica.  Will is off to do an internship with Robert Perry, and we booked his flight to the U.S. from Costa Rica as we were anticipating that we’d be there weeks ago.  Being stuck in Panama still meant we had to deal with a fifteen hour bus ride, and the number of buses is limited so I had to spend two nights in Costa Rica in order to make sure he got on the plane.  This left Kathy and Danielle in charge of the boat.

Their first day alone they decided to go into town to pick up a few things.  When Kathy pulled up to the dinghy dock there was a large local working boat tied to it, taking up about three quarters of the available dock space.  This forced her to tie up on the end of the dock, a spot we generally avoided because of the sharp, rusty corner of a girder that is exposed there.  At the time they parked the dinghy there were other dinghies directly alongside the dock and they were on the outside and far from the corner.  But by the time they arrived back from their errands many dinghies had come and gone, and ours was pressed up hard right into the nasty, rusty sharp corner.

It put several holes in the tube and shredded up the rub rail.  I suppose the rub rail was doing it’s job, we might well have had a huge tear instead of a few punctures had this hard rubber rim not been there.  The holes were large enough to deflate the front of the dinghy very quickly.  Kathy wasn’t sure how bad the damage was – it looked awful and cover and area over a foot long on the boat – so she was a bit nervous using it since it couldn’t hold air in the front half of the boat.  Kathy and Danielle spend the rest of their girls week together on the boat.

My bus from Costa Rica left at noon on Saturday and arrived at 3:00 AM on Sunday.  Sunday morning some cruisers had organized a “dinghy patch party” – we were not the first, second or third cruisers to have their dinghies badly damaged by this dock.  A knowledgeable cruiser was bringing supplies and know-how to show others how to fix up their boats.  Back when we had a soft bottomed dinghy I learned how to patch up holes, but it had been a while and misery loves company.  So we went even if I was still yawning at 10:00 in the morning after my late night arrival.

When I had a look at the damage in daylight it didn’t seem as bad.  I quickly spotted two punctures, unfortunately they were located near a trim strip which would make them trickier to patch.  But I was happy to see it was not a long tear like we thought.  I was able to patch them fairly quickly but you don’t know if it really works until the glue on the patches cures.

We’ve not fixed every leak, but it holds for a day or two.  I’m going to have to put in some more time tracking down the final slow leak but for now it works and we’ve still got other fish to fry.

What is disappointing is that this dinghy is only a year old, we bought it new last year in St. Martin and were looking for years of hassle free living with a nice new boat.  Usually patches and leaks and ugliness are afflictions of older boats nearing the end of their lives, not new boats.  Cruising 365 days a year puts a lot more wear and tear on things than using them on weekends in the summer, but this stay in Panama has put a couple of years on the dinghy.  The engine cowling has also been mauled by the dock more than once and is now seriously scratched up.

IMG_1335_cropped

You can see the damaged rub rail, and the grey trim that made the patching more difficult since the patch could not lay flush to a single layer of hull.

 

The dinghy had a rough week.  While not directly related to the dock (though somewhat, as the rough edges on the metal are hard on dock lines), our painter had also chafed.  We were actively looking for some replacement line and couldn’t find it the day before it actually broke and the dinghy ended up on the rocks earlier in the week.  Of course it turned out that wasn’t actually as bad for it as a controlled stay tied to the dock.

Posted in ouch, Panama | 2 Comments

Mr. Fixit’s Update

On Feb 22nd, 2014 Published By B.J.

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?

Posted in broken things, projects | 1 Comment

The “All is Lost” Drinking Game

On Feb 13th, 2014 Published By B.J.

Sailors are used to sailing being represented badly in films and on television. Whether it is little things like a Viagra ad with a sailboat that is obviously being towed with the sails on the wrong side of the boat or John Candy’s huge boxer shorts being used as a spinnaker to add an improbable performance edge to an unlikely boat in an unrealistic regatta, to big things where entire movies like Waterworld and Cabin Boy are allowed to exist.

All is Lost is a recent sailing movie starring Robert Redford. If it hadn’t been done at least once by at least half of the sailing blogs on the Internet, and almost all the sailing web sites, it might be fun to pan this fairly poor movie on a moment by painful moment basis. From watching it, it appears the only sailing consult was the sales clerk at a West Marine whom they asked “So we’re like, making this sailing movie and we need to put stuff on a boat, so what should we get?”. At this point any blow by blow analysis would be redundant.

There should be a more fun way to address this. Sailors still watch bad sailing movies, because we still like to see sailing even if the context is wrong or stupid – sometimes they still get the cinematography down right. Shout “bring out the Whomper” during a race and almost everyone on board will either laugh or groan – we’ve all seen Wind even if we rank on some parts of it some of the sailing footage is exhilarating.  And many sailors have, on rare and special occasions, been known to lift an adult beverage or five.

In the spirit of the many State of the Union (drink every time the President says ‘economic opportunity’, two if the Vice President yawns), Star Trek (drink one for every ‘dammit Jim’ and two every time Kirk’s shirt rips and shows his chest), and other media themed drinking games…I think we have our review.

So kick back, loosen your foulies up, pour your favorite concoction and have some refills on standby, and let’s have a go.

The Rules…

· Take a drink every time law of sailing or ocean physics gets violated. This may include containers that appear to be self-propelled, boats that sail quickly with no wind, or an old guy being dragged over board by his harness that vaults back on the deck like a fourteen year old Olympic gymnast mounting a balance beam.

· When you see a poorly trimmed sail take a drink. Scratch that…just take a wee, wee sip because it could get ugly fast.

· Hoist a cold one every time Robert Redford’s character (hereafter ‘Our Hero’) eats something cold and nasty directly from a can.

· When Our Hero breaks out an obviously under-powered or inappropriate piece of equipment, like a cheap 700 Candela coastal flare instead of a 15,000 candle power SOLAS off shore flare that is good for one drink.

· Drink two each time Our Hero could have ended the movie Right There if he’d had a handheld VHF radio. Or an EPIRB (a device to tell rescuers where you are and that you are in distress), or any other basic safety equipment that almost everyone that heads out to sea has.

· Each time something goes wrong…wrongly, like a loose connection at the masthead that causes the VHF to flicker in and out like it has a loose power cord you should drink.

· When Our Hero appears on deck without a life jacket or PFD. Never mind…you will get alcohol poisoning and need a stomach pump, as he never wears any flotation throughout the whole movie.

· Every time a life raft, drifting with next to no wind and no sails, makes more than 200 nautical miles of forward progress in a single day drink two.

· For each precise position plot made with no idea of speed or direction of drift drink one.

· Drink if you see a shark.

· For each inappropriate use of a nautical item, e.g. taking out something called a “storm jib” and putting it up in the middle of a storm when you should be reducing sail area, or throwing out a sea anchor to hold yourself stern-to the waves and wind to encourage waves to come over the transom of your boat and swamp it, have a drink. This is a slightly arbitrary category for some actions.

· For each object inappropriately stowed loose on a counter top while sailing off shore, you should have a chip or snack because by now you will be pretty hurting and need something in your stomach.

· Every time you think “Why doesn’t he have…” and it’s some sort of thing a normal sailor might have, like a ditch bag or things IN the ditch bag like a radio, GPS or smoke signal take a sip.

· Drink when Our Hero does something non-sensible or inappropriate when the appropriate thing could have worked – such as using a tiny handheld flare in the middle of the day instead of a daytime approved aerial flare or smoke.

· Take a cold one for any broadcast of “This is the Virginia Jean calling for an S.O.S. instead of using a proper Mayday call (what are we, on the Titanic?).

· Every time the wind and waves differ on different camera angles in the same scene (or a “continuity error”) take another drink.

· Any time you, or anyone watching with you, blurts out “Now why the hell is he doing that?” or any equivalent phrase drink up.

· Drink every time you see something that is clearly done for dramatic tension or artistic reasons, not because any actual sailor would think it makes sense. This may overlap several of the above categories, that is OK. This includes things like shaving instead of putting up your storm sails when you see a storm coming or going forward at night, in a squall, to put up a sail you do not need.

Yes, I get the movie is an artistic medium and the sailing is more of a metaphor for the larger message and all that. That doesn’t mean there aren’t dozens of experts that would have happily made this movie better and realistic. Manufactured crises from poor sailing do not make for a good flick if you know even a little about what is going on.

Frankly my biggest concern with this movie is that people who don’t know better will think that Our Hero is a good sailor. The people who care about us worry enough about what we are doing without thinking we are just as unprepared as this guy is.

Posted in Movies | 9 Comments

The Week of Broken Things

On Feb 13th, 2014 Published By B.J.

This is the week we discovered a few more major things were broken and needed to be dealt with. And we also paid the price for not addressing some of these things the second we noticed them, and for not being aggressive enough checking things out before we left. If you’ve been following along so far you know we are waiting for a heat exchanger for out generator. Now, we are waiting for a few more things.

The Sails

Prior to coming here to Panama City we knew there were a few touch up repairs needed on our Genoa. We’d seen some strings coming off on some of the sun cover and figure the sail needed a bit of TLC. We’d also hoped to add some chafe patches on the main sail to where the sail rubs against the shrouds running down wind. You may remember we had this sail looked at in Trinidad when we had to get the clew repaired; we felt pretty confident this was a sound sail. There is basically one sail maker in Panama, and he is in Porto Bello on the other side of the country. We’d hoped to get the sails off to this sail maker when we were on the Colón side of the canal; it never happened. And it didn’t happen before we left for the holidays. And with coming back and moving the boat then running into generator problems it sort of fell by the wayside.

The Main Sail Problem

The other thing that fell by the wayside was the Main. On the last day with wind on the way from Aruba to Panama we had some trouble furling in our main. This has happened before, our main rolls up like a window shade and stores inside our mast when not in use. These systems are notoriously finicky – the main sail has to be tensioned just so and the boom leveled just right or it can bind up. Things like tension in the main halyard can affect this, and given we’d just taken the main off and put it back on we figured the halyard tension was the culprit. When we had a calm day when we arrived we could sort it out. This didn’t happen in Colón, in a marina you rarely point the right way (into the wind) for sail wrasslin’. We didn’t need the sails to cross the canal or when we arrived in Panama City, where it was actually quite windy on our mooring at Balboa Yacht Club. So we didn’t have much chance to sort it out, but we weren’t concerned as we figured we just hadn’t tensioned it right. All we had to do was roll it out, tension it properly, then roll it back in.

Eventually we realized we might as well do it while waiting for parts. A windless day finally happened so we started to pull the sail off. The first step to pulling the sail out is releasing the tension on the hydraulic backstay, then one person cranks the outhaul (line on the aft corner of the sail) while one activates the furler. Very quickly it started binding up. This was not unexpected as it went away ugly and needed to be sorted. And it bound more. We got the foot of the sail all the way out but the head wasn’t coming out. In and out we tried – this is typical, usually if there is a bad fold jamming things up you can work it out. Finally we realized something else was going on so we took out the high powered binoculars and had a look. From the deck it looked like the sail was no longer attached to the top of the furler…not good, but not unfixable.

Will volunteered to go up the rig and have a look at it and reattach it. When he got up there (seventy-five feet or so above the water) he realized there was a bigger problem. The sails luff rope (the rope that goes into a groove in the furler and holds the sail in place) was ripped out at the head and the sail was torn and jammed inside the mast. He came down with pictures for us and we worked out a plan – go back up the mast and bang on it with a hammer until it worked free. Believe it or not this worked. The sail could not come down with the head jammed up against the metal, but the judicious application of a screwdriver and a deadblow hammer loosened it enough so we could take it down. We lowered Will to the deck and took the sail down, leaving it in loose folds on the deck. While doing this, we saw the first rain since we’d arrived back in January start up…great!

With the sail down below I called the sailmaker, who does not speak much English. He told me he had a friend who was nearby and could pick up the sails in fifteen minutes. Too quick! The Genoa was still up and we hadn’t flaked the main. The main – the lighter of these two sails weighs over 100 pounds and is about 710 square feet in size, the Genoa weighs around 135 pounds at almost 900 square feet of stiff, heavy cloth. We needed to drop the massive head sail and fold up both of these sails small enough to fit inside a sail bag. Then we had to get them in the dinghy and motor them in and move them up the Death Defying Dinghy Dock. It took one trip for each sail…and a lot more than fifteen minutes. We also decided to get the sail for the Pudgy repaired but that was tiny and little effort compared to the big ones!

The Main Furler Problem

This left us a little puzzled – WHY did it rip? The furler didn’t make a particularly normal sound when the sail came out, could this have caused it? On closer inspection we found a reason.

A sail furler consists of several moving parts, and some that are fixed in place. Traditional sails are hauled skyward from lines at the masthead called halyards. Now if you imagine taking the head stay – the wire the sail is attached to – and spinning it to roll the sail up like a window shade. What is going to happen to that halyard? The answer is, that it will wrap around the stay also, making a snarled up mess. To address this furlers have parts that spin around the stay on both the top and the bottom of the sail while the stay (or more correctly the extrusion tube around the stay) spins. At the top of the furler is a piece design to spin with the sail (the halyard swivel), while the top of it stays fixed so the halyard doesn’t get all wrapped up.

What we discovered is that the halyard swivel on the main did not seem to want to move. This has a bearings on it to help the swiveling, it is possible for these bearings to get dirt, salt and other contaminants in them which makes the unit a bit more recalcitrant about spinning. It is my job in the next day or two to get in there with some water, some WD-40, and a fair helping of foul language patience.

After the sail came down Will went to pump up the back stay again to restore some rig tension, and found that it would not pressurize. This led to the discovery of…

The First Hydraulic Problem

I had noticed a little reluctance to pressurize the last time I put on the back stay, but it worked. Now it was barely working. I was able to get a little pressure on to hold things up but not enough, and who knew for how long.

Evenstar has two distinct hydraulic systems – one to handle the back stay and boom vang, and a second to furl the sails in and out. They are completely unconnected and unrelated to each other beyond being hydraulic in nature.

Hydraulic systems of this sort would not have been my first choice for a boat, while they generally work easily, quietly and invisibly in the back ground they do add another level of complexity to the system.

Back when we were preparing to leave I had a work list some six pages long that I’d been struggling with for a couple of years. Complete a job, add two on…that sort of thing. One night a few months before we left I was lying awake thinking about the list when all of a sudden I though “Holy shnikeys I completely forgot about the hydraulics on my list” except I’m pretty sure I thought a different word than “shnikeys”. Yup, nowhere on the list had I added anything to do with hydraulics, so the next day I added “Check hydraulic systems” to the list.

A month or two later we were preparing to get the boat out for a test sail and I found a problem with the boom vang refusing to hold pressure any more. How fortuitous – I needed to have a hydraulics guy look over our systems anyway, and now I also need him to rebuild the vang. This was approaching the height of Silly Season for riggers, that time when every one of their clients wants everything they’ve put off ordering all winter done last week. So I hold myself mostly responsible for what happened next. I gave my vang to the rigger (different one that I normally use) and told him I was headed off shore for a multi-year cruise, so could he please give my hydraulic systems a thorough check to make sure all is well. While I have no doubt he checked, the look was at best cursory because a few more questions could probably have drummed up more work for him that he didn’t have time to do. I made the mistake of not pressing him harder, and not checking for myself that all was as it shou ld be.

Fast forward to this week now, and our Vang/Backstay system is no longer working. The backstay is more important at anchor, as it keeps the rig taught so things like the headstay and radar don’t flop around when the boat moves. At sea while sailing they are both critical components for rig and sail trim. Although you can get by without the vang, sailing without the rig properly tensioned by the backstay can make things break. So is a big problem.

The seal on the drum that pressurizes the system was shot. I spent some time doing some research and consulting on line, and got some great help from Bam Miller at the Oyster Bay Boat Shop who was kind enough to speak to me about the problem. The upshot was that we should have simply rebuilt the controller system before we left on general principles. The seals that hold it are typically good for ten year (plus or minus with use patterns) and our system was fifteen years old in 2012. This was one of those “few more questions” that would have saved us this aggravation.

Fortunately we found a shop in Panama City that rebuilt it in a day and replaced all the seals. But this got us thinking…

The Second Hydraulic Problem

It got us thinking about the other hydraulic system. We’d already had some problems with this, two different hoses burst while we were in Grenada and had to be replaced. These were above deck hoses that are exposed to the sun. With hind sight being perfect, we should have replaced them before we left on general principles too.

What got us thinking was that we’d noticed some flaking of the cover on some of the hydraulic hoses. the black plastic coating was falling off in places and was exposing the cloth covering underneath it.

My first thought was that this was just a UV/Sun cover on the hose and wasn’t really part of the structural integrity of the hose. So I exposed some more hose and took pictures to bring with me to the hydraulic shop.

When I showed the pictures to the technicians at the shop they concurred that these hoses, while probably sound, were indeed getting old and we would be wise to replace them.

Easier said than done.

Problem one is access to the hoses. They are full of hydraulic fluid, so when you disconnect them they leak hydraulic fluid everywhere if you are not very careful. They leak hydraulic fluid everywhere even if you are careful. The lines for the headsail furler run behind the cabinetry from a closet in the forward shower up to the bow. The hoses for the main sail furler run from that shower locker, under the floor and up behind a wooden raceway in the closet in the bunk room.

Removing the hoses meant a partial eviction of both children and about 75% of their stuff for the duration. We needed to remove the hoses to bring them to the shop to get the matching fittings. A total of six hoses needed replacing, one pair for each furler and one pair for the feed pump. The headsail furler pair came out with only a few hours of grunting, sweating, swearing and cabinetry disassembly. The main sail furler…not so much. We’re still a little stumped on that, as there are some cabinetry parts blocking removal of the panels we need to get behind, we are waiting for Hallberg-Rassy to get back to us with tips on how to get them out without a crowbar or fire axe.

To add to the fun, when the hoses were dropped off I was told there was no easy way to get fittings for them in anything but “mild” steel. The current fittings are believed to be Bronze – hard, corrosion resistant and generally approved for the marine environment. Stainless Steel would be an acceptable alternative. Mild steel is neither stainless or bronze – it will get eaten up in short order, maybe a year or two. Alternatives are being researched to get something more resilient, but my suspicion is we will have to make the replacement hoses with mild steel, then make up a second set of very expensive hoses back in the states that we carry for spares.

We should know later in the day.

Adding Insult to Injury

Back when we were Trinidad we overhauled some of our refrigeration system. We replaced the evaporator on the ‘fridge because it was leaking coolant gas. We also had a problem with the freezer, where it dumped all its coolant. The valve used to replace the coolant was defective, so that had to be replaced.

When we returned from the U.S. in January the freezer had again dumped it’s coolant and was no longer cold. I refilled it, and a few short weeks later had to add more refrigerant. The other day, in the middle of all this it lost all the coolant again. There is clearly a leak in the system, and it seems to be getting worse. Fortunately I’ve got some tools and a nice book sitting at our mail service in Florida that should help me sort this problem out – to find the leak and fix it. In the mean time I have to find some more cans of R134a refrigerant. While the auto parts store I checked the other day in Panama City had a whole aisle of air fresheners and shiny things you could screw on your car it didn’t have anything to recharge air conditioners with. Go figure.

Posted in broken things, hell | 1 Comment

Remote Blogging Update

On Feb 7th, 2014 Published By B.J.

My apologies for dropping of on the blog updates for a couple of days, but the internet seems to have disappeared.

Oh it’s still there I am sure, I can see it on my phone that I finally coughed up for a data plan last month. But an iPhone keyboard lacks a bit as an interface for writing anything more than two sentences long. The internet seems to have disappeared from our anchorage.

When we dropped the hook here there was a nice strong signal provided by the Panamanian government. The government has made a strong effort to connect all but it’s most remote citizens to the internet with free Wifi, and largely succeeded by creating almost 500 government sponsored access points all over Panama City and in other towns. You can sit in pretty much any public park in the city and get a nice signal courtesy of the Panamanian government.

The connection, “Internet Para Todos” (or “Internet for everyone”), is almost ubiquitous and our connection here in the Las Brisas anchorage was no exception. For all the work we’ve had to get done and all the broken things we’ve come across in the last weeks at least we had the consolation that the kids could make good progress at school while we sat here. Until last Friday.

Last Friday the government connection disappeared and hasn’t come back. There have been a few other weak signals that come and go that we’ve been able to pick up but even they have seemed to disappear. There are still signals but they are all locked and private and we don’t have the key.

So here I am sending in a “Hello World, we’re still alive” post via the Single Sideband message sent through a mail access point far away (probably on St. Eustatius, 1,000 miles away from here). I’ll try and keep up some updates but we’re not going to see a lot of pictures until it gets sorted out.

Posted in Housekeeping | Comments Off on Remote Blogging Update

Mi Español es Muy Pequeño

On Feb 4th, 2014 Published By B.J.

Communicating in Panama has been the biggest challenge here, at least for me it is what I’ve struggled with more than anything else.

“Mi Español es Muy Pequeño” or “My Spanish is really small” may be the most helpful phrase I’ve learned to date.  It at least gets me a smile and a nod and some more sufferance for my sputtering as I gasp out wrongly conjugated verbs matched with improper gendered nouns while waving my hands and making charade like gestures.  “Yes our goes the boat ” hopefully conveys “Yes, we took our boat through the Canal”.

We have managed to over pay in restaurants, over pay in taxis, get lost, take the wrong bus, order the wrong food, order the wrong drinks, waste a day paying to do paperwork we didn’t need to do, not order enough/order too much food and drinks, get browbeat by a cashier at a grocery store, be left waiting for an hour at a dinghy dock, and in general avoid, miss or screw up quite a few things because my Spanish is so weak.  Fortunately I have not yet badly irritated any government officials or gotten slapped or arrested, but we will be in Central America for another couple of months so those are not ruled out.

Will has the best edge of any of us, having gotten through Spanish II in Ninth grade before we left.  Unfortunately additional Spanish was not practical with Keystone School’s curriculum, so he left off there.  Unlike me he can frequently understand the gist of what someone is saying.  He knows his numbers and he can usually articulate a basic thought even if he doesn’t know all the words.  I suppose having some verbs like “have”, “want”, “go” and “do” makes a big difference.  Action verbs = less pantomime.

The trouble of course is convincing Will that if he sees me sputtering, waving my arms and shaking my head at a confused Panamanian it is perfectly OK for him to just butt in and bail me out.  We’re working on that, I don’t think he realizes I won’t be the least bit offended by him stepping in as I am generally more hopelessly confused than the hapless local I am trying to communicate at with.

I took one day of Spanish in college.  I’ve listed to a “Learn Spanish” CD’s in the car and gave up shortly after it made it past the alphabet.  I’ve started Rosetta Stone but probably much too late.  Although it those efforts combined with being immersed in the language have actually made a difference.  The other day we negotiated our way in and out of town and actually conveyed a few ideas to the tax driver that he appeared to understand.  I even negotiated for a cheaper fare, something I am getting better at.  Of course shaking my head at the cabbie and saying “No, no” while walking away is pretty universally understood, but I am making progress even if I get confused between six (“seis”) and seven (“siete”).  Holding up your fingers works too, though it gets confusing with numbers over ten.

Hindsight of course tells me I should have started boning up on Spanish when we first moved on the boat.  Later I was much too excited resurrecting my French when we were in the French Caribbean islands; I justified putting off Spanish by telling myself I would only get confused trying to learn Spanish while speaking French every day.  Ha!  Instead now I find myself spitting our French words while I am groping for the Spanish words that are eluding me.

One technique that has helped has been a data plan for my phone so I can use Google Translate to deal with more complex language.  Although I’ve heard the translations can be a little wacky, in general at least it helps me get the basics across.

The technician, Juan, who has worked on our generator speaks less English than I do Spanish.  This has been interesting.  To remove the parts he brought an assistant.  To put them back in he did not and needed more of my help.  So we had to figure out things like “Start the engine now”,  “Your heat exchanger is ruined”, and “The generator isn’t putting out enough power” as we were testing the installation.  Several phone calls to his office where someone that could translate helped, the rest was Google Translate, finger pointing and out best guesses.  Though when the job was finally done and Juan was getting cleaned up there was no confusion when I asked ¿Cervesa?

Even more entertaining was contacting the French Embassy here in Panama City.  A French Embassy in a Spanish speaking country does not hire people for their English proficiency.  So I called the embassy looking to make an appointment.  I’ve been told on a good day that I “sound German” when I speak French (this was not a compliment I think), on a bad day I know I sound like I am speaking with a mouthful of marbles.  The lovely woman that I spoke to, well her English was not really any better than my French though I can assume her Spanish was first rate.  E-mailing each other worked really well, better than trying to talk.  Visiting the Embassy for our Visa interviews there was not a word of English anywhere but we did get by with our French.

Well, we’ve got Panama, Costa Rica and Ecuador (for the Galapagos) before we get to French (yay!) Polynesia.  Here’s hoping if I get arrested the judge speaks English.

Posted in Panama | Tagged | 1 Comment

Generator Blues, the Refrain

On Feb 3rd, 2014 Published By B.J.
Well my Gen’rator ain’t working, and I ain’t got me no power
No, no my Gen’rator ain’t working, and I ain’t got me no power
We done fixed the Stator and its makin’ juice
But the heat exchanger’s broken, ready to cut it loose
‘Cause it’s leaking sea water and runnin’ too damn’ hot
Makes me sit down and wonder if the whole dang thang just ain’t shot...

 

You’re just going to have fill in your own basic minor chord blues riff there.

DSCN0034

The back 1/3 of the generator lying in the cockpit

When we called in the cavalry from the local Westerbeke distributor we knew there were two problems with the generator. 1) It was not making A/C power when running and 2) it was stalling out intermittently.  Ninety percent of diesel issues involving stopping are tied to fuel.  Since in my research I found a fuel filter that I previously did not know existed (and therefore had not changed in seven years) I thought I might have a line on what that second problem might be. I was wrong. The good news is the Main Stator came back rebuilt, the generator is reassembled, and when it is running it is producing AC power again.  So that part of the repair worked well. The bad news is they engine was stalling out not because of fuel problems, but because of problems relating to a failed heat exchanger.  Which I might add is every bit as hard to rhyme as “Generator”. Most larger diesel engines in boats are Fresh Water Cooled, like your car but they use a different means to cool off the liquid (or Coolant – a mix of fresh water and anti-freeze) that does the job.  Your car uses a radiator to cool this fresh water coolant.  Air passes over the flat metal blades in the radiator while coolant pumps through the baffles, the baffles radiate off the heat and cool the coolant.  As your car goes faster you get more and air flow to help this.

There are two different problems with this in a boat.  First a sailboat doesn’t go more than about ten miles per hour under power so you don’t get the same airflow.  But more importantly the engine is buried deep within the bowels of the boat which is usually a hot stifling room with little airflow.  So instead of relying on fast-moving air a “Fresh Water Cooled” boat diesel will generally use sea water to cool the Coolant in the engine.

This is accomplished with a “Heat Exchanger”.  A heat exchanger a bundle of copper pipes contained inside a tube.  Sea water passes in one direction through the small copper tubes.  Engine coolant is flushed through the heat exchanger around the smaller tubes in the other direction, bathing the small cool tubes and bleeding off heat from the coolant into the sea water which is then pumped out the exhaust.  The sea water (or “raw water” as it is known) only contacts the engine in the exchanger, the pump and the plumbing hoses.  Since raw water contains a lot of minerals, salts, and contaminants and can be corrosive this is a good thing.  There is no direct liquid contact between the Coolant, which circulates through the whole engine, and the raw water.

It appears that one or more of the small copper pipes in the heat exchanger has failed.  Sea water is getting into the freshwater coolant.  This means several things.  First, the exchanger has failed.  Some exchangers have replaceable cores, where the copper pipes can be pulled out and changed.  This does not appear to be the case in our engine.  Secondly, seawater has circulated to places it shouldn’t.  This is bad, very bad.  A very thorough flush of the cooling system must be done after replacing the exchanger to ensure any ongoing damage stops and all salt and deposits are cleared out.  Some engines do use pure raw water cooling, so it is not instantly fatal to an engine, but those engines are designed to deal with raw water.

The final implication is that some things in the engine might get damaged.  It appears the overheat sensor is one of those things.  Fortunately it is not a big expensive part, but when it senses overheating it disrupts the electrical flow needed to keep the engine running.  This part is damaged, and is likely the culprit for shutting the engine down even when it was not over heating.  The sensor needs to be replaced but the heat exchanger problem needs to be rectified first.

The good news in this is we can likely get a used replacement exchanger here in Panama for a not outrageous amount of money – a new one ordered in the states costs more than $1,200 and that is just the part, not the labor to replace it.  The bad news is we are losing more time wasting away here in Panama City.

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Posted in broken things, Generator | 2 Comments