Can't Start - Again

25 June 2017

We had planned only a quick stopover in Dinner Key as we made our way north. We reluctantly prepared to leave, turned the engine key, and again were rewarded with the sound of silence. I poked around for a few minutes, but given that we had just replaced the starter and the battery I was quickly at a loss. I did find this one wire near the starter that was loose, but I couldn't for the life of me find where it went, even though that had to be within six inches of where I found it. Or maybe it was made redundant with the new starter.

As usual, it was a weekend. I asked at the office and they gave me a name of a guy in the mooring field. He was no longer doing boat work on the side, given a day job and a new baby. He referred me to another gentleman who was out in an hour or so, but quickly ascertained that he didn't know what the problem was. We started cold calling businesses but it was the weekend and nobody was answering.

Down the dock strolled an older gentleman rocking a pair of blindingly white jeans, Hawaiian shirt, mirrored sunglasses and the kind of hat hipsters had taken to wearing. I had the feeling he had been wearing one since the 50s. He was walking a bulldog with one hand, and had a poorly disguised beer in a paper bag in the other. We had seen him several times and exchanged pleasantries. He asked what the problem was. It turns out his name is Armando.

He listened patiently to my tale of woe, then he explained that he managed 19 boats here while living on his own. Once I explained that I thought it was an electrical problem, he recommended a gentleman named Carlos. Carlos arrived a couple hours later, on a Sunday, because he was already visiting a boat a couple down from us. Out came the multimeter and he traced the electrical path from the battery to the switch at the binnacle and back to the engine. He opened areas on the boat I had never seen before. After about 45 minutes of that he crawled under the engine and told us to try and start it. It turned right over.

Satisfied that he had found the problem, he explained that the loose wire was indeed from the starter. There was a coolant hose just above the starter that might not be OEM, and it seemed intent on occupying some of the same space as the starter, which was definitely not OEM. The conflict could be coming from the hose, the starter, or a combination of the two. Regardless of cause, vibrations from the hose were being transmitted to the top of the starter. Soldered to the top of the starter was a spade connector which you could now only see if your head was on the floor looking up. Sure enough, inside the connector at the end of the errant wire was the spade which had fatigued off.

After expressing some reservations Carlos trimmed the end of the hose so he could hike it up and get some air between it and the starter. He managed to do that without even removing the hose (and having to drain the fresh water coolant). Next he soldered a wire to the pad where the spade connector had been, and connected a new spade to the end of his wire. The two were connected and we were in business again - except.

Carlos observed that our raw water pump was leaking. It had had a minor leak out of the appropriately named weep hole for some time, probably since we had bought the boat, but it seemed that the rate was increasing. There was salt on adjoining areas. Carlos explained that while he would return to port with such a pump, he would not leave.

We decided it was time, and he was able to get a new Westerbeke pump in the morning. His assistant George installed it as I watched. I'm not just looking to have the boat fixed, but continuing education as well. It was a smooth, easy job to swap out. So easy that I thought I could do it next time. This turned out to be important. I wrapped up the old pump so it could be rebuilt and become a spare. The new pump spun and pumped with nary a leak.

By this time a Monday departure was shot, so we paid for another night and set our sights on Tuesday. Next stop Ft. Lauderdale.

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Don't Call Me Late for Dinner - Key

23 June 2017

In the morning up went the anchor and we departed Rodriguez. We were in the protected Hawk Channel for most of the trip north, but as you approach Miami the reef falls away and you are directly exposed to the Atlantic. It got a little rolly.

We were headed in just south of Miami, west in the channel which is south of Biscayne, then across the bay to the Dinner Key approach. South of Biscayne is what's left of what's called Stiltsville, which seems appropriate given the appearance. These houses have a great view but seem problematic to insure during hurricane season.

Into the Dinner Key marina we went, and Heather backed into the slip well even though it had been a couple months. When we were in boat shopping mode we looked at a couple of boats here, two or three years ago. It was nice then, and since then they have rebuilt the main marina building. Like most Miami new construction, it's up on stilts, about 20 feet or so.

It was nice to do laundry, take a shower, or even just go to the bathroom ashore without getting into the dinghy. Many of the benefits of civilization are just a stroll down the pier away. A short walk from the marina is a very nice little area with restaurants, and even a movie theater that shows more than one movie at a time. You can see the downtown Miami skyline in the distance. A couple days of this could spoil us.

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Leaving Marathon

22 June 2017

We finally managed to escape the clutches of Marathon. Since Miami and/or Bimini are too far for a day on a sailboat, Rodriguez Key is a popular anchorage for the night in between. It's a ways south of Key Largo. We hadn't anchored in a while and it took us four tries to really set the hook to our satisfaction. There were already two pairs of sailboats rafted up in the anchorage. Before dark they split off on their own anchors for the night.

In the morning one pair headed east to the gulfstream and probably Bimini. The other two headed south towards Key West. We headed north to Miami.

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Lazy Bird

18 June 2017

A couple days before we left Marathon it was very windy. Since our boat on a mooring points into the wind, the dinghy at the back is relatively out of the wind. One day we had a stowaway who needed a rest.

He was so tired that he wasn't scared off by me taking pictures, or even turning the generator on. 

After a couple hours he left  a present on the dinghy, which was thankfully washed off by the rain that night.

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Wildlife in our Back Yard

28 May 2017

We have seen lots of sea creatures in our time in Marathon. A good-sized ray jumped out of the water while we were in the dinghy and scared the crap out of us. Lots of fish I struggle to identify by anything but size and color. Sea turtles twice and dolphins pretty frequently. But we still hadn't seen any manatees.

Well one day right off the dock outside the office I'm looking down towards our dinghy and I think to myself - why is there unexploded ordnance in the canal?

After a second look, and then they pop up for some air, it looked like a baby manatee and its parents.

OK, now I get the name sea cow.

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Exhausting Elbow

2nd Week of June 2017

We were trying to leave Marathon but the boat had other ideas. The generator had been a little finicky more than once, and just before we were going to leave it started belching out black smoke again, then threatening to die. We didn't really need the generator while we were on the move, but we had a world renowned diesel mechanic, the aptly named Diesel Don, as a neighbor. As we proceeded up the coast who knows what kind of tech support we would find? As it turned out - good, but that's another story.

We decided to stay and fix it now. This thing is buried deep inside our starboard lazerette (normally under a ton of crap we have stored in there), which is in turn inside a sound enclosure. The valve cover is off in the picture below, and Don tsked the state of our valve adjustment, but moved on to our primary problem. This was a little gadget in the lower right hand corner of the picture, below the black hose.

Since people started putting engines on boats a fundamental issue has been what to do with the exhaust, which is at fire starting temperatures. There is the dry stack approach used for bigger boats, where you treat it like a chimney, and direct the heat out of the boat with as little loss into the boat on its way. Smaller boats like ours tend to use simpler process with one big side effect (well, two but that's for later). To cool the exhaust the raw (sea) water first goes thru a heat exchanger for engine heat, what would be a radiator in a car. Instead of transferring engine heat to a coolant then into the air, the heat exchanger takes the hot coolant and transfers it to a steady stream of sea water pumped into the boat for that purpose.

Anyway, after exiting the heat exchanger the sea water is warm, but it still has one more job to do. A cast elbow forms the first part of the engine exhaust. The sea water is sprayed into the exhaust, cooling it dramatically. Now you just have relatively cool exhaust gas and warm water that collects into a muffler, which then uses the back pressure to gurgle out the collecting fluid every few seconds. This is a pretty elegant solution except for the horrible life of that exhaust elbow. Exhaust at hundreds of degrees mixed with a very corrosive sea water and steam mix doesn't add up to a very long life.

In fact they're only supposed to last for 500 hours of operation or five years or so. Now that Don is taking things apart ours appeared to be the original with over a thousand hours and more than a decade old. Oops. After one of the nuts which had corrosion welded in place was surgically removed the elbow was off. Pieces were falling off, so we were just in time to prevent at least a big mess, if not a fire, as exhaust would start to find its own way out of the boat.

The picture below is looking from the engine side. You should see daylight from the other end, but it is completely clogged with corrosion products, exhaust residue, and who know what else brought in with the sea water. It's amazing that the generator ran at all. This is the classic banana in the tailpipe (Beverly Hills Cop). The engine can't exhale, so it can't breath.

Below is the shiny new exhaust elbow for the low, low price of of $330. Who knows where we will be 500 hours and or five years from now.

Installation went much faster than teardown, and after a quick valve adjustment and a swap out of the air filter we were back in business. The generator is actually much better than we ever knew, and with everything on the boat switched on, including the battery charger and two air conditioners, the generator chugs along just fine. Like many things, it turned out to be nothing that money couldn't fix. In Don's case, cash only.

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Radar Love Part Two

3 June 2017

As previously discussed our radar had decided to go topless with predictable results to its reliability. Again I'm drawn to similar narratives in high school. During engine repairs Jason and I had agreed to sell the other their working half of their radar, but we had not decided who was who yet. Jason was stoked to get his new chartplotter so now he was on a boat electronics bender. Drugs might be cheaper. He agreed to sell me his dome for a few hundred bucks.

As it turns out his was kind of a Frankenstein unit already. A refitter had had a stack of these domes and Jason was able to choose among them for the best. Below is a shot of the innards. It's amazing that this technology has gone from secret, war-winning, cost is no object technology to commercially commonplace in 75 years, with new features needed to get people to upgrade. Below is a picture of the inside of Jason's dome. Ours looked like a bucket of rust.

As a part of the deal Jason did the install as well. My tubby butt wasn't going up the mast. He removed the dome from his boat and headed over to ours. Up he went with Water Bob manning the lines because I had tweeked my back. Water Bob and his three (and a half) legged dog had delivery of water to boats in the lagoon as one of his many jobs while he racked up hours towards his captain license.

After some connection iterations the box at the binnacle started to recognize the dome. A few more restarts and they were fast friends. We had planned to try and swap out the tri-color light with an LED, and the anchor light with a automatic LED, but that didn't get done this time because the parts weren't available at the local West Marine. Next time.

But now we have radar again. Although we don't need it during the bright daylight of southern Florida we've been running it to get more used to the info it provides. Imagine if you saw things using only light that originated from you, and that you could only see the first object the light contacted, maybe. The world looks a little different that way. It's better than nothing in the dark and fog.

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