|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You are welcome to apply any part of this article to your own personal use. Please do NOT publish any part of the article or apply any part of it to any non-personal use without the express written concent of the author.
Usually in any given week on a cruise we would have experienced some sort of adventure that our readers would love to read about. But not this week. There was no exploring, no sailing, and no anchoring. Some would argue that there was no cruising. Yet what we did this week is as essential a part of cruising as the sailing, anchoring and exploring.
Volant has been at the Masonboro Boatyard and Marina, Wilmington, South Carolina. While Kit has been back in Ft. Lauderdale completing some agreements she made last year, I have been up to my a..., er... elbows in challenging boat chores.
In my other life I was a computer software professional. An understanding of hardware doesn't come easy for me. [How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? It can't be done. That's a hardware problem.] A good bit of studying was in order before even tackling what could be a huge job for me, although probably an easy one for a reasonably competent Marine Engineer.
A Marine Engineer might not always be available when needed. Perhaps we'd suffer a breakdown while on a passage or in some remote corner of our planet. Thus one of the major challenges of cruising is to become as self-reliant as possible. For me that means doing as much of the mechanical work on the boat as I can, especially while I have access to professionals for coaching and for backup. If my rude attempt ends in disaster, I can call on and learn by watching and assisting the real engineer. Early on my disasters came quite regularly. Nowadays they are quite rare. I've even occasionally surprised myself by recovering from my own disasters.
Just to give you a flavor of an essential yet less romantic aspect of cruising, here's a description of one of the projects I tackled this week.
One of our highest priorities was to get the forced air diesel heater functioning again - not a need here in the Southland, but an absolute requirement as we reach more northerly latitudes. Back in Ft. Lauderdale Kit and I did a bit of debugging and concluded that lack of fuel was the problem. We figured that most likely the fuel pump was failing, so we ordered a replacement and brought it along.
The pump is located in the engine compartment, naturally quite inaccessible behind a rats nest of hoses, wires and an engine fuel filter. And, even more of a challenge, it is located down low in the compartment requiring me to practically stand on my head just to get my hands on it.
The first task was to move as many of the hoses and wires as possible to gain access. It was not an easy process, but it did get done with about two hours of grunting, sweating, and the issuance of a few choice words to encourage the pieces to cooperate.
I have to be careful with my use of certain words around the boat. Our parrot, Admiral Nelson, normally sits in his cage in the pilothouse. The engine compartment is under the pilothouse sole. Once the Admiral learns a word or phrase, he will be repeating them for the rest of his life, and that could be another 50 years. In this job he would be well within earshot of any comment I might make.
Time to remove the old pump. Two screws secured it to the bulkhead. One was above, relatively easy to reach. The other was below the pump and impossible to reach from my heels-over-head position above the engine. Someone had screwed it in so there had to be another access point. An engine access hatch is under the galley sink. That had to have been it.
So down into the galley I went, crawling on my belly far enough under the sink to poke my head through the hatch. Yes, I could see and even reach the lower screw. But it was a two-hand job and I could only get one hand into the area at a time. After a bit of cogitating I figured that I could actually remove that screw if I wriggled just a bit farther into the engine compartment, twist around just so, stretch a little here and contort a bit there. A good deal of sweat and a few choice words later [Admiral, cover your ears], the screw was removed.
Back up in the engine compartment I was able to disconnect the old pump from the fuel lines and connect in the new one. A quick test of the new pump failed to produce hot air from the heater. Hmmm... When I disconnected the pump, I noticed that the output line dripped diesel but the inlet hose was dry. Perhaps the fuel pump was not at fault. Maybe it was the fuel line instead.
That turns out to be not a good thing. The input fuel line comes directly off the engine fuel line between the starboard diesel fuel tank and the shutoff valve. There was no shutoff valve for the heater itself. Removing that line was going to be problematic. The starboard tank was holding about 120 gallons of diesel. If I messed up there could be as much as 120 gallons of diesel in the bilge. Not wanting to be the next Exxon Valdez, I turned off the automatic bilge pump so that it wouldn't automatically send the fuel overboard.
I did have aboard a shutoff valve for the heater. The plan was to install it directly to the fuel pump. However the shutoff valve was of standard American dimensions and the pump was metric. It wouldn't attach.
I would just have to bite the bullet, removing the old fuel hose and installing the shutoff valve in its place, hoping that that particular connection would be standard American. The shutoff valve and the fuel hose fitting looked close enough. I crossed my fingers hoping that the valve would fit.
Crawling back under the galley sink I could reach the fitting with one hand. No amount of twisting, contorting, folding, spindling or mutilating could persuade my body to get two hands on that piece at the same time. I would have to attack the problem one-handed. I started unthreading the fuel fitting. So far, so good... So far, so good... Then without warning the fitting popped loose. Fuel poured all over my hands and arms, a bit splashed on my face, eventually finding its way down into the bilge. Along with the fuel some very strong choice words escaped. At least the Admiral was napping and didn't hear anything this time.
I got the fuel hose reattached, stopping the flow of fuel, then withdrew to lick my wounds and regroup.
There's no need to bore you with all the bloody details. Suffice to say that eventually the shutoff valve was installed. The fuel line, indeed the guilty party, was replaced. The fuel pump was reattached. The hoses and wires were secured as they should be. Five gallons of diesel oil in the bilge were cleaned up and properly disposed of ashore. It took a bit less than ten hours to complete the project.
All this was accomplished without the aid of air conditioning, in 90+ degree heat and about 90% humidity. That shower at the end of the day was never so welcome.
One measure of the success of the venture was that the heater was now blowing hot air, my primary objective. Another important measure was that, in spite of all the choice words that flowed so freely during the process, the Admiral didn't pick up a single one.
Next week we turn our attention again to traveling northward. Volant will have her full complement of two crew. We'll be watching for an appropriate weather window and, weather permitting, heading for New England.
|
|
|
|