We spent Thursday and
Friday (28-29 Jul) comfortably docked up at AYB, mixing up re-provisioning
excursions with several maintenance activities with and some fun socializing
time.
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| Billy & Becky's Kady-Krogen 39 The Edge |
The provisioning was made a whole lot more convenient when
our new dockside neighbors, Billy and Becky Edge, loaned us their very nice
(and turbocharged) Audi A6, which gave Chelle the ability to drive around and
load up on all sorts of things. That was
a fairly important to-do, as we are planning some consecutive sorties that
probably won’t allow much time for such things over the next two weeks. (That is, once we get out of here…more about
that further below.)
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| Kady-Krogen 39 The Edge Parked Immediately in Front of Ghost Rider |
We also spent a very relaxing evening of back-to-back happy
hours with Billy and Becky. We started
out on their extraordinarily clean 2004 Kadey-Krogen 39, (appropriately named The Edge) whose layout provides an
astonishing amount of space for the boat’s size…its engine room actually
provides more headroom than the KK48 does.
And then we walked one slip over to Ghost
Rider to show them around our Nordy and imbibe in more happy hour
treats. They are good people and we
thoroughly enjoyed their company.
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| Our New Steering Ram Cylinder |
As for the maintenance….over the span of two days we got the
leaky steering ram removed and the new one installed. After topping off the system’s hydraulic
fluid we spent considerable time bleeding the system, both with manual helm
inputs from the upper and lower steering stations, and also using the autopilot
for consecutive hard-over rudder movements from stop to stop. Everything felt and looked good, although
we’ll monitor and perform repeated testing over the next few days. We had the old steering ram sent out for a
rebuild since its leak was very slight and only requires a single seal to be
replaced; it will be carried as a spare.
The AYB yard staff also arranged for a Cruisair A/C tech to
visit us and review our recent cooling challenges – the conclusion was that the
system was performing well once the pressure was goosed up, so now we have a
few tips to utilize if it acts up again.
Given that the water temp is above 90, and the ambient air has been in
the mid-90’s, with heat indices above 100F, and we’re now getting our chilled
water loop down into the 40’s and that doesn’t give us much to complain about.
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| That Small Cylinder at the Middle and Bottom of this Pic is the LPG Culprit |
Then we spent considerable time troubleshooting our recent
LPG failure. And we determined that the
Fireboy-Xintex brand solenoid – which opens a valve to let the LPG flow
provided it does not detect a leak – was toast. A multi-meter test of the
solenoid revealed a bad circuit. After manually soap-testing all the
connections to verify we had no leaks, we bypassed that device (actually
removed it), and afterwards the gas flow to the range and oven was great. But it’s a safety issue running without that
in the supply loop, so AYB issued a rush order for a replacement, which should
arrive by Monday.
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| And the Damned Thing Costs Around $100 |
As an aside....so far we are impressed with the AYB techs -- James Taylor is the service manager, attentive and efficient; and his go-to tech on staff, Tim, is a quiet, patient and thorough individual. At the conclusion of today's maintenance activities Tim also arranged for two (free) bicycles for us that he had just sitting in the shop shed.
Since the weather forecast for Saturday through Monday calls
for numerous storms anyway, as a cold front sags down from the north into our
area, staying here a few more days isn’t such a bad thing. But that will trigger the need to reexamine
our routing to Boston and recalibrate our timeline, which we’ll now do with the
extra time here at AYB over the weekend.
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| Some Potential Tropical Systems Spooling Up |
