The motorhome tour of the U.S. was a fantastic first half. Then we had the Pacific Northwest for the summer months and now we are back in Mexico to rejoin the boat (s/v Faith) For the cruising season.
As usual you don't just show up, splash the boat in the water and take off. There are oodles of things that need attention before going anywhere.
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| The rudder IS missing!! |
Since I joined Sandy on Faith in 2008 there has been work aplenty. To get ready to go that first summer was spent adding solar panels, rigging, containment and retention "stuff" and generally making ready for longer passages. Every year we made both major and minor improvements to make Faith more comfortable and more capable as a cruising boat. The second year we added the boat jewelry of the five boat unit windlass to raise and lower the anchor successfully EVERY time it was needed. Other improvements were relatively minor or incremental. This year it is time to fix some long standing issues and make with a little bit of prettier too.
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| The drive shaft out of the boat. |
Since we left Portland we had been plagued with a growling bearing noise in what I call the carrier bearing (just forward of the shaft seal) for the propeller shaft. It has been annoying and until you take the whole assembly apart, from the transmission coupler to the stern tube, you can't realign it so that you have an effective repair. There are lots of details I could insert here but for now suffice it to say that this is something that can only be done in a work yard out of the water. We brought down from home NEW motor mounts (.75 boat units) to initiate this repair. By balancing and stabilizing the shaking of the motor we stand a better chance of having less strain on the carrier bearing and the cutlass bearing. Standing at the propeller in the yard you could move the shaft up and down a bit... that is NOT how it is supposed to be... it should be stable in that bearing. So, we have taken the shaft out of the boat and removed the bearings as well. We ordered a new cutlass bearing by way of Puerto Vallarta and the work crew is now looking for a replacement or a rebuild for the carrier bearing.
In this process we discovered that the rudder had developed cracks along its trailing edge. This is because we have black bottom paint on it (and the rest of the bottom) to keep the marine life to a minimum. You really get a slow boat if you allow the barnacles and grass to grow there. Anyway, when we leave the boat out on the hard for the summer the heat builds up in the rudder from the sunlight hitting it all the time and it expanded and cracked. This needed a fix so the rudder, that had to come off anyway to take the drive shaft out for repair, was taken off and sent to the shop for some work. It will be a few days before that comes back so we have time to put the mechanical parts back together and get aligned properly.
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| Faith out on the Hard looking good!! |
A boat is meant to be in the water and when you take it out, especially in the conditions we face here in Mexico, you are tampering with so many things.
Take for instance the batteries we use to store the sunlight we have in abundance to power our electrical "stuff". Without the batteries we would have to stay hooked up to the dock to power our refrigerator, for example. When we left the boat after a brief visit last November I had hooked up a smaller solar panel to keep the batteries alive but probably under estimated the draw down that they would experience. I did not want to keep our larger panels attached because we would not be around to monitor the batteries' water levels and I did not want to fry them. Altogether we have 8 (yes, eight) six volt (golf cart) batteries as the house bank (that's roughly 800 amps of power) and one 12 volt start battery. The 6 volters are wired to give deep charge 12 volt power for our electrical needs. When we came back to Faith the batteries appeared to be flat dead. Yikes. That's a full boat unit to replace them!!! So, I hooked up the larger solar panels again and for the last several days have been monitoring their slow rise back to useful power. It may not work but since we are in the yard and without any current draw it seems worthwhile to try to resurrect them.
There are more projects that need doing: we bought an electric head (that's a toilet) for the forward bathroom that I will need to install, we brought a wind generator to install to add to the solar panels, there are several small projects like a boat name graphic to replace the peeling one that came with the boat and so forth. One large expense this year is that we should and will repaint the bottom to keep the marine critters at bay. In addition, we have decided to have the upper blue stripe repainted to spruce up the look of the boat over all. A couple of seasons ago we had rebuilt the life lines. They now look so good that some of the rest of the boat needs the spruce up. Yeah, it's a lot like dominoes. Oh yeah, and THEN we get to put order in the below decks to start to live aboard again!! I miss the boat and the life it gives us, so getting back on board will be a wonderful thing.
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| The chaos below deck while we are away!!! |
Note: One boat unit is a thousand dollars.
The next updates will likely focus on how all this will come together.
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