The Week of Broken Things

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.