The Perils of Pauline

When I was a little kid my parents had a favorite movie, or at least a favorite saying based on this movie, "The Perils Of Pauline".  In the movie if anything could happen to Pauline it did.  I can associate.  As I recall Pauline was quite a screamer.  Uh huh, me too.

This past Saturday we sailed out of Whitehall Bay and returned home to Herrington Harbour North.  We'd been gone for three long months exactly.  Not to mention exactly one month longer than we had planned.  Our sail home was very nice, a bit chilly at 55 degrees F with 15 to 20 knots of wind out of the NE.  We sailed on a broad reach down to Thomas Point light where the wind died down to about 10 knots and our speed dropped from 7 knots to about 4 or 5.  When we entered Herring Bay we cranked up the engine and ran for home.  It is sooooooo nice to be back home!

The work on the cabinetry is finished.  I'll post some pictures about that below.  We knew coming home that we'd have a busy weekend with cleaning the boat and moving back on board.  We'd been living in a small efficiency apartment for the last three months and almost everything we own had to be moved out by noon on Sunday.

So, we get back to the slip around 1500 on Saturday and I'm up on the dock hooking up the shore power and talking to our neighbors.  Cheri starts calling my name, each time getting a little more urgent, and finally says we have a major water leak down below.  Hmmm.  Maybe I'd better stop goofing off and go see what's up.  Turns out she opened the drawer under the starboard settee in the Salon and found water.  This is not good because under that drawer is the water heater and the pump and distribution manifold for fresh water on the boat.  On the other hand, if this is a fresh water leak it could be considered a good thing since at the very worst we could only take on 250 gallons.  That's still a lot of water to have sloshing around in your living quarters.

I opened up the settee, turned on the pump and looked at all the hoses and connections.  No sign of a leak, no running water.  In the compartment with the water heater I see plenty of water but no running water.  I stick my hand in and it's hot.  That's not good.  If all the hoses are in good condition, not leaking, then the only source of hot water is going to be the water heater itself.  I turned everything off and started soaking up the water.  Never made any progress.  The water heater holds 11 gallons.  At least, it's supposed to hold eleven gallons.  Ours was dumping it out all over the place.

I removed the five hoses; engine supply and return, over-pressure bleed off, cold in and hot out.  I disconnected the power and removed the screws from the front plate.  The rear plate is held down by simply sliding into a pocket/bracket.  The compartment this thing is in is only slightly larger than the water heater itself.  To get it out I used clothesline to form two loops around the housing and used these as handles to lift it out.  When I got it to the top of the compartment where the hatch sits the clearance was so tight the clothes line didn't want to pull through.  With Cheri's help I removed the clothesline while the heater was in the air and we lifted it out.

I went on-line and found that West Marine had a similar unit, same dimensions, same capacity, same layout.  I ran down to WM and bought the only one they had in stock.  It was now 1930 and we're barely halfway through.  With the two units sitting side by side I swapped out the brass water fittings and dragged the new unit over.  I gently sat her down into the compartment and she wedged right at the top hatchway.  What???  I checked the dimensions and found the new unit was 5/16" bigger in every direction.  Instead of taking it back I decided to make it work.  I got out the trusty old saber saw and notched the opening enough to slide this critter in.  I then found that the rear bracket was 3/8" wider and wouldn't fit inside the bracket.  Take it back out, cut down the rear bracket with a hack saw and try it again.  That worked so now it was time to drill the holes for the front bracket.  That was when I found I didn't have my drill, had put it in storage to get stuff outa the way while we moved back on board.  Grrrrrr.  Grrrrrrr.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  I tried punching holes with screwdrivers and other improper tools but eventually gave up for the night.

Next morning I got up in time to get the drill out of storage in Annapolis at 0600.  Back at the boat I drilled the holes in about two minutes and had the bracket mounted.  I got all the wiring connected and moved on to hooking up the hoses.  Piece of cake!  Not.   The heat exchanger hoses that run to and from the engine have a wire support embedded in the rubber, which is good.  But it makes it very difficult to get them onto the hose barbs, especially with only about 1.5" to work in.  Busted knuckles, blisters and a bucket of bad language didn't do the job.  Finally I struck on the idea of using Cheri's hair drier to warm up the hoses and they eventually went on, though not willingly.

In the end the damn thing worked.  We couldn't have any water, hot or cold, until I got this thing going so it wasn't something that could wait.  It probably would have been worthwhile to pay Butch to do the installation but I just couldn't stand the thought of paying someone else to do the work after all we just went through this winter.  Money wins out over common sense.  Here's a picture of the little monster.  Notice the notched hatchway.  Also notice the drawer slides that were in the way.  I used a gigantic screwdriver and pried them out of the way to make clearance.  All the connections are on the left side and none of them had enough length to connect with the heater out of the compartment.  That would have been way too easy.  Hopefully this little demon will last longer than all of us.  I know this episode has taken several years off of my life just in frustration.

 OK, here's some pictures of the galley.  I wasn't able to get the pictures to line up with the comments so just bear with me here.  The first one is from the Nav Station looking aft.  Shows the cool-man new faucet, the cutting board for the sink and the overall look of the galley. 

The second picture is a closer view of the aft end with the divided fridge and freezer set into the counter top.  On the right is the new cabinet under the companionway and the knife slot in the counter.

Next pic shows the corner cabinet behind the freezer.  This was built for our coffee maker and has a dedicated outlet behind that little cubby hole inside on the left.

 The next picture shows the new spice cabinet behind the stove.  The left side was kept taller to allow room for olive oil and taller bottles of cooking stuff.  That sounds technical, doesn't it?

The final two pictures are the before and after shots.  More storage, more counter space, overall better use of space.  Those faux louvered doors are the cat's meow.  The Corian is awesome, looks like yellow quartz.  We are extremely pleased with how nicely this turned out.  Would we do it again?  Hell no!

Tomorrow, tomorrow........

It's been a while since I've done an update, about three weeks or so, and there's a lot to update.  Seems like the last place I left off was working on the Nav Station equipment panel so maybe I should pick up there.

The instrument panel is finished.  It actually turned out pretty good and almost everything is operational.  Almost.  The new panel was something that had been laying around for a while.  I knew it was a project that had to be done but I didn't have a good enough excuse to tackle it.  The need for a DC sub-panel made it happen.  The old panel (first picture) had some stuff that wasn't being used and a few items that didn't need to be mounted there.  It also had this humongous panel for the wind generator control that just didn't look right and hogged a lot of space.  I disassembled the panel and cut down the face plate, 1" narrower and 4" shorter.  Much better!  I then covered the instrument panel with masking tape to prevent chipping the nice black surface when I cut out the holes for the instruments.  I made templates for each instrument and laid it all out in a way that made the most sense to me.  Our instrument panel is usually covered on the right side by the monitor for our mini Mac computer.  With that in mind I put the instruments that would be used most often on the left side.  I tried to lay everything out in columns and it worked out to have some space left over beneath the sub-panel in case we wanted to go with a larger breaker panel some day.  With everything drawn out on the tape I drilled half inch holes in the corners of each instrument cutout and then used a jig saw on the straight cuts.  Reassembly was pretty straightforward and the actual wiring was easier than I expected.

Behind the instrument panel I glued a piece of 3/4" plywood against the inside of the hull and used that to mount two solar panel controllers.  These are daisy chained together and will be able to handle our new solar panel arrangement; two 85w panels and two 140w panels.  We needed separate controllers because you can't mix and match different sized panels and the combined current capacity was more than one could handle on it's own.  So now, when we get the panels all mounted we'll have a capacity of 450 watts and 38 amps.  That'll go a long way towards keeping those batteries charged.

With all that done I installed a new 50 amp breaker in the main DC panel and ran 8 gauge, 3 conductor wire to feed the sub panel.  I double checked everything twice over, doubly, and then powered up the sub panel.  Voltage checks checked out so I powered up the MFD (multi function display) and the backbone.  All the instruments powered up on the first try.  How cool is that?  In fact, everything worked except for the wind generator.  I pretty much expected that because when I was wiring that up I hit the back of the display board with the negative wire from the generator and got a spectacular arc.  I mean, I made some serious ozone.  I'm pretty sure I can get parts for that thing so I'm not real concerned.  Stuff happens.  I'm fairly excited about having the new i70 display at the Nav Station.  We'll be able to call up all kinds of information with that.  Pretty handy for when you're sitting at anchor and want to know what's going on up topside.

We got our cool man sonar transducer put in.  This has a twelve degree offset to account for the angle of the hull where it's mounted.  That'll make it look straight down and give us a true indication of depth.  It'll also give us a digital picture of the bottom  in something like a 20 to 40 degree window depending on the depth and the frequency.  It even has a temperature sensor so we can tell if the water's suitable for skinny dipping.


We also got the bottom painted.  This was the first time in three years and I'm pretty pleased with how well this paint holds up.  We're using Pettit Trinidad SR, a "hard", non-ablative paint.  I prepped the hull with a quick washdown in 30 degree weather.  It was snowing!  With that done I sanded the bottom from the waterline down.  We actually raised our waterline by about 2.5".  With all the weight we've added to the boat she sits down further in the water and gets a scumline on the boot stripe.  With the higher waterline we'll have about 1" of exposed bottom paint which'll keep her looking much better.  I gave her one single fresh coat over the entire bottom and a second coat on the "wear" areas like along the waterline and the leading edge and bottom of the keel and rudder.  Cheri repainted the boot stripe the original color, Jade Green, which is actually almost black with green highlights.  We also cleaned up the prop and the bow thruster and gave them some anti-fouling paint too.With all that done I polished and waxed the hull above the waterline.  La Vida Dulce is looking very smart these days, lemme tell ya.

One other thing we did was to paint a code onto the anchor chain so we could tell how much chain we have out when we anchor.  We used fluorescent yellow and green.  The yellow is one band for every 25' and the green is one band for every 100'.  As an example at 150' we have 2 yellow bands and 1 green band.  Simple but effective.  The chain is 300' long so this works out very nicely.  The previous owner had marked it with different colored wire ties but they turn brittle and fall off and then you don't know what you have.  The whole reason for knowing how much chain you have out is because for the anchor to dig in well you want to have between 5 and 7 times the depth of the water, plus the length of the chain from the surface to the deck, about 6' or 7' for us.  So in 10' of water we want to have about 60' to 80' of chain out.

Work in the galley is almost finished.The upper cabinets are mostly in and we've selected heights for the shelves.  The cabinet behind the stove has three shelves and will be used for spices mostly because it's not very deep.  Between this cabinet and the stove is a storage slot that holds the piece of Corian that sits on top of the stove.  The cabinets were all supposed to have louvered doors but we didn't think about the sliding doors.  These have to be about 1/4" thick so they can slide past each other.  The cabinet Dude came up with a very cool faux louver look that we decided to use on all the cabinets.  He also milled finger pulls into the door frames and inserted pieces of "ivory" from some old piano keys.  The cabinets are beautiful and they add so much more storage space.  This was a really worthwhile upgrade for the boat.

This week (1st week of April) she'll be launched and checked out before we take her home on Saturday.  There's still quite a bit of work to do but I think once we have her cleaned up and we're all moved back aboard we'll hafta take a break, light up a cigar and drink a toast to a successful winter project.  Uhm, projects.

Man-oh-man, it's gonna be sooooooo nice to be back home.