Engine & Varnish

I’ve noticed some of the people here seem a bit serious

Yet others seem more friendly 😉

Seriously, everyone here is very pleasant, I’ve noticed some of the locals have a reticence to become best friends with visitors on the first meeting, but warm after a while. The Island has a lot of visitors during the summer, and I expect that creates issues, good and bad.

So Monday 6th May arrives, this will be my 4th week on the boat, even though I’ve done a lot, time seems to be racing past, it’s only 7 weeks before I have to head back to the UK, so everything has to be finished in the next few weeks if I want to get the boat back out sailing before then. I am thinking hard now about my plans for the rest of the year.

So onto the engine work. The water pump had to come off so I could replace the faulty seal. I’m waiting for a new repair kit to arrive from the UK, seeing as the one I brought out is still in hiding. The pump came off without much trouble, but no longer turns, I suspect sitting through the winter with water that got past the seal and into the bearings is the problem, this isn’t supposed to happen, but the repair kit will have new bearings, so no big deal.
Next I tried to remove the Oil Cooler, without damaging it further, if possible I would like to repair it, however I couldn’t disconnect the hoses from it, they were well and truly seized tight. So I gave up for the day, squirted WD40 onto the annoying bits and left it to soak overnight. WD40 likes to take its time freeing up seized mechanical things.

Tuesday: I manage to disconnect one hose from the cooler, this allows me to get other hose off the gearbox, so eventually I get it out, but not before it’s had a good bashing. However I don’t think it had any future anyway, it’s pretty corroded.

The engine/transmission area underneath the cooler is looking a bit rough so I give it a good cleaning, it could do with painting, but it’s just too awkward to access.

The oil cooler is a heat exchanger, it intercepts the water coming in from a hole in the bottom of the boat, the engine raw water thru hull & sea cock, and then uses this to cool the oil that passes out of the gearbox (or transmission as it’s often called here) through a load of small tubes inside the cooler, and returns to the gearbox. The sea water continues onto the main engine heat exchanger, where it cools the fresh water circulating around the engine. To complicate matters further, the cooled fresh water in the engine circulates around another oil cooler, cooling the oil for an engine. It’s good that this is all an evolution from a simple engine, because if the original engineers had known this much complexity was required, I doubt they would have bothered developing a diesel engine, instead just going straight to the neutron drive.
I took the opportunity while in this area to start replacing some of the water hoses involved in the cooling system.

An early finish as I had been invited by Jim & Ivana, who had just returned from their epic road trip around Canada and the USA, to pop over to his for a bit of food and to meet Rick.
Rick is a sailor and a pilot, he flew up here in his light aircraft and left it at the airport over at Alert Bay and got the ferry here to check up on his boat. It’s called Resolution and is pictured below. It’s a cracking boat, it has a full size olympic swimming pool, a bowling alley and a cinema. Just kidding, it’s 50ft long on deck, which is 25% longer than Sister Midnight, but inside it’s at least 100% bigger. He has a workshop, a log fuelled fireplace, a lot of space lounging around. It’s a lovely boat, but very heavy, I think when full, his fuel tanks weighs more than our boat, it’s also very beamy (fat) and doesn’t go up wind to well, but he’s happy to drop the hook wherever he is and wait for a wind shift anyway.

Ivana cooked us a lovely meal and we had a great chat about boating and generally sorted the world’s problems out. Rick may be off to Mexico later this year so we may well meet up with him on the way.

Wednesday:
Below is a picture of a railway into the sea. Trolleys go on these and when the tide is in, you motor your boat onto the trolley and the trolley is hauled up the track by a giant winch, until you are out the water and you can then work on the underside of your boat.
These things are called ‘ways’ around here, and when people refer to ‘the ways’ they generally mean the marine workshop, run by Tom, who has a few ‘ways’ in his yard. so it was off to the ways, oil cooler in hand, I had a new oil cooler, but the connections where different to the volvo one, so I was hoping Tom would make me some new ones. I will return next week to see if he managed that.

There are lots of buildings like the one below on the island, most of them are Net Lofts, where fishermen can store and repair their nets during the winter or closed seasons.

Later on I spend time on Rick’s boat helping him tune up his SSB radio. His ATU seems to be struggling on various frequencies, I extend his 1/4 wave vertical by 20ft of wire wrapped around the 4 poster in his stateroom, however although it changes which frequencies we can now tune, it also causes his aircon fans to startup on their own. This not being the solution, we put it back to how it was, and it’s all working fine now. Must have been an airlock 😉

I returned to my problems, and start to hack out the exhaust pipe for the cabin heater, this had collapsed when I tried to find the leak last week, a section had corroded badly. Unable to buy any locally, I am having a new length shipped out from the UK. It looks like somebody had tried to repair it before with a new section attached with a now very rusty mild steel hose clip. This was a messy job, but once I removed the exhaust I gave the inside of the stern of the boat a thorough cleaning. It’s lovely down there, especially as I was able to remove a stack of wires and hoses that didn’t seem to go anywhere or do anything in particular.

I took the raw water filter apart and gave it a good cleaning, I could see water dribbling out of hose disconnected from water pump. This means the seacock isn’t closing off fully, not a lot of water, but it explains why the automatic bilge pump runs every now and then for a few seconds. 

Thursday and a trip to town is called for to see if I can get a few bits from the chandlery I will need next week. First though, as it’s sunny and not windy I throw up the staysail onto it’s track. It’s good to get some canvas out, tie on the sheets and remember how I used to sail this boat ‘back in the day’. The boat has a cutter sail plan, as shown below, and I generally sail with a traditional yankee/staysail rig, although on long downwind passages the yankee is replaced with a huge genoa.

Arriving in town I saw this sign, which took me back to Aisa, of course it’s still the same ocean

Friday was calm and baking hot, so I got the mainsail and yankee up. Then I strung up a hammock on the foredeck, got out the John Steinbeck book ‘The Sea of Cortez’ and had a lazy day. The Sea of Cortez is where we plan to spend Christmas this year.

Saturday was cold so I stayed indoors and did some coding. I managed to teach myself a bit more about programming in a language called Python, it’s not a new language, but it is very trendy these days as it’s handy for doing internetty things, and that was my task. After a few hours fun with version problems, environment variables and the like, I managed to connect to a remote computer in Italy and pull off a load of data, using fancy encoding and encryption, with just a dozen of so lines of code. I was impressed.

These guys below completely filled the pontoons with boat bits, while they painted the hull. They have left now, I expect they are out fishing far away by now.

Sunday: I built a wooden box for storing cockpit bits & bobs in, as the old one fell apart. It’s a bit crude, but should do the job. I washed the starboard side of the boat down and removed all of the junk off that side as Monday is the start of the big varnish job. I intend to start each day at 8AM varnishing, until I have 7 coats of varnish on and the boat is looking stunning.

I may not write anything for a bit, as it would only say,”got up, varnished, went to bed” for the next week or two.

Paul Collister