Foreword: We are still hunkered down, observing public
health protocols, and like everyone else closely monitoring the continuing
Covid-19 conundrum. Up until 01-April
here in Florida some businesses and beaches actually remained open (and
crowded), a stunningly stupid idea. Leave it to Florida to finally announce
mandatory stay-at-home on April Fool’s Day. Of course the federal efforts are
just as mysteriously nuts. We hope you are
staying safe & sane despite the chaos.
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| The Loggerhead Marina Office in Palm Beach Gardens |
Over the previous weekend we were
saddened to say good-bye to Dave and Amy, as they were heading back to their
dirt-dwelling home in Tennessee. They
had also recently decided to put their N40 (hull # 36) Intrepid up for sale (with Yacht Tech as broker, the listing is HERE.) Dave is a pilot and Amy is a flight
attendant, and they were missing their own airplane. Chelle had volunteered to finalize
a few things on their boat after they departed, such as the disposition of a
few remaining food items and defrosting the freezer chests, but that didn’t
take long.
Also over the weekend we got a brief
update from Brad & Lorraine Carlton aboard N55 Adventure. They had been
working very diligently and generously on hurricane relief efforts in Green
Turtle Cay, Bahamas when the Covid-19 crisis intervened. Here is Lorraine’s email update as of 29-March:
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| Chelle Finishing Up Work on N40 Intrepid |
“We are hunkered down on GTC. 24 hour curfew in effect except for food,
water, exercise. We haven’t left the
boat in 4 days. Got word today that we can go subsistence fishing with members
of own family only. So, that is our plan today. No dinghies allowed on beaches.
Needless to say, our construction has stalled for now.
One restaurant (McIntosh) remains open for take-out only. The grocery
store is still open. The ferry is no longer running to Treasure Cay so the
island has been isolated. 14 confirmed cases in Bahamas. 12 in Nassau and 2 in
Grand Bahama. Stay safe!”
Brad and Lorraine have done incredible
work over there for several months now, and it’s worth reading about when you
have a few minutes at this LINK. We regret not being able to join them.
Maintenance – Part II
On Monday,
30-March we returned our attention to the punch list. Dan from Yacht Tech came to the boat early to
work on the control board for the MSR’s A/C compressor. But after fiddling with it Dan determined
that the entire board wasn’t toast. (This is the board we had salvaged from the
old pilot house compressor two years ago.)
Instead, his sleuthing revealed the problem was now the “Triac” switch,
which is a small transistorized relay on the control board. There are two of them on each Cruisair
compressor unit – one controls the cooling cycle, the other the heat
cycle.
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| The Two Yellow Arrows Point to the Triac Switches....the One for Heating Was Functional but the Cooling Switch Was Not....Se We Swapped Them. |
Dan removed the one for cooling
and swapped it with the heating Triac…and voila,
the thing started working. That means we
still needed to source a new Triac for the heating side, but that most
certainly is not a priority right now in south Florida, and those things are
cheap compared to a whole new control board.
Dan is now officially Rick’s favorite marine electrician.
By Tuesday,
31-March one of our last punch list items remaining was servicing the
windlass gearbox. A proper maintenance
curriculum calls for draining and refilling its gearbox with 90W gear oil every
three years and that was now due. There
is a (mostly accessible) drain plug, but getting it refilled was another story. The manual for the hydraulic Maxwell 3500
indicated the entire motor assembly had to be dropped for that part of the
operation (their assumption being you would also replace seals.) But Glen & Rob from Yacht Tech have a
technique of pumping oil into the sight glass cavity, and while a bit messy it
gets the job done. Rob and Rick fired up
the wing engine and hydraulics, ran the anchor through a few up/down cycles,
double-checked the oil level in the sight glass and called it a success.
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| The Hydraulic Windlass Motor....Which is Located in the Chain Locker at the Bow of the Boat. |
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| How Glen Crawled into the Chain Locker is Best Left to the Imagination. The Same is True for How He Got Out of There. |
On Tuesday evening Yacht Tech owner
James Knight stopped by for a courtesy visit, and given how hectic his world
has been, we were quite appreciative.
James had returned from Washington state (where Yacht Tech was branching
out) about a week ago and had gone into a self-imposed quarantine while
awaiting his Covid-19 test results. We
celebrated his negative results with Goombay Ghosts and entertaining
conversation, and as usual James had some thoughtful advice on the few
remaining maintenance items for Ghost
Rider.
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| James and Chelle Aboard Ghost Rider |
While the weather had been very pleasant
since we left Fort Myers back on 12-March, on Wednesday, 01-April we awoke to even better conditions. A mild cold front had passed through
overnight, and after a brief rain shower in the wee hours left a cooler and
drier air mass behind. Temps stayed in
the 70’s all day with humidity hovering around 44%, which by south Florida
standards is quite dry. After Rick hosed
down and mopped the boat we shut down the A/C and opened hatches and
doors. The perfect weather was a bit
mocking since there was no place to go.
Coincidentally, that same day the governor of Florida finally got his
act together and reluctantly, under pressure, issued a state-wide
“stay-at-home” order, which effectively shut down all non-essential
businesses. As it turns out, that did
not include Yacht Tech.
Testing the Boat’s Bonding System
In the previous blog entry we had
briefly mentioned at its conclusion that Rick wanted to determine just how well
the boat’s bonding system was performing.
A vessel’s bonding system is what keeps its various metal components
that are immersed in sea water (a very good electrolyte) from acting like
battery terminals and corroding to a quickly dissolving death. Technically speaking, that’s called galvanic
corrosion. The concept is simple –
connect all those metal parts (bronze thru-hulls, stainless steel shafts and
rudders) to a much less noble metal (one or more zinc anodes) and make that
less expensive chunk of metal the sacrificial device. A small slab of zinc (or aluminum) is a lot
cheaper and easier to swap out than a thru-hull, shaft, rudder or engine block.
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| The Always Handy Multimeter and Reference Electrode Assembly. The Latter Needs Enough Cable Length to Go Over the Side & Into the Water. |
Ghost
Rider’s bonding system consists of #8
green AWG wires and copper plate straps that run fore and aft on either side of
the hull. These are connected at several
locations to embedded through-the-hull terminals fitted with 4” x 8” sacrificial
zinc anode plates. (Prop shafts have
their own “donut” zinc collars.) Then,
inside the hull, all metallic parts and thru hull fittings touching water are
connected together with more #8 AWG (tinned & stranded copper) that are
branched off the fore and aft wire and copper runs.
While we’ve never observed galvanic
corrosion damage or uneven wearing of zinc anodes, Rick was curious. A bonding system check is properly conducted
using a “reference electrode” (usually with a silver-chloride element); it gets
immersed in the water around the boat and its long cable plugs into the
negative port of a multimeter; the positive probe of the meter is then connected
to the (hopefully) protected metal component, and the meter then displays the
voltage delta. On a fiberglass boat
protected with zinc anodes the meter should register from -550 to -1100 mV per
ABYC standards, though Steve D’Antonio prefers a more conservative range of -750
to -1100 mV. (And it’s worth noting that
the adequacy of any boat’s bonding system can only be tested with the boat in
the water.)
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| Testing in Progress on the A/C Raw Water Through-Hull. |
The readings Rick took (initially just
on three thru-hulls) on Ghost Rider
were in the sweet spot, all at -940 mV.
Theoretically at least, all such readings should be identical if all the
connections to the boat’s bonding system are solid and consistent. Likewise,
the readings should remain the same when taken first with the shore power cord
disconnected, and then again when shore power is re-connected to the boat’s
electrical system – that’s a comparative that tests whether the vessel’s galvanic
isolator device is doing its job. And
those also looked good on our meter readings for Ghost Rider. If you are a
boat nerd, want to know more about marine corrosion, and have time on your
hands (who doesn’t during the current lockdown?) the ABYC webinar video at
this LINK is edifying.
We still have a few punch list items to address, but both scheduling and obtaining parts are getting to be a challenge. We hope to have a better idea of what will be possible early next week. Stay tuned and stay safe.
