|
|
This is a blurb I wrote a few months ago and had saved as a draft. I forgot that I hadn’t published it. So a bit late but here it is.
The reason we went up to the boat for the last few days was to clean her up a bit and get the bilge pump working again. A few months ago the bilge pump had come on continuously and for some reason couldn’t be turned off. I’m not sure that Angela even knew it was the bilge pump as it is a really nice diaphragm unit that sits up in the back of the engine compartment and doesn’t really look like a what you would think a standard bilge pump would. It ran for a day or two before she found out where the noise was coming from. It’s pretty quiet when running dry. Finally she just cut the power line to it to get it to turn off. I think what happened is that the automatic switch went bad or the control panel for it went bad and left it running.
Another project that needed immediate attention was the port hawse pipe on Valkyr. I was walking up to her on the dock and just happened to notice that the hawse pipe was about to fall off. So I pulled it all the way off. I thought some of the rest of you would be interested in how the sides of the boat here are designed. It is hollow up in there.
This was another project from a few months ago.. actually last October.. since then both cowls have been replaced with Nicro Solar vents.
The plastic cowls on Valkyr’s dorade vents had become very discolored and brittle with large chunks broken out.
You know all the shit that accumulates in the corners of a boat? This story isn’t about that kind of shit. This story is about the kind that leaks through the ruptured diaphragm in a pump on a hose that terminates in a holding tank.
If that opening doesn’t grab attention, I’m not sure what will. Let me backtrack just a bit.
We actually spent three days working on the boat this week. The teak on deck is now at about 90% and in some area’s even has three coats of Tequa. We are really liking the Tequa, it goes on thin and penetrates on try teak for the first couple of coats and on the third coat gives the teak a soft luster that is just beautiful. So far we have used about one and a quarter quarts and it has covered 90% of the boat in two coats and some parts of the boat in three coats. I think we will stop at three coats and then see what durability is over time. Pictures of all this will be forthcoming in the next week or so.
This is a preview of Stories of s/v Valkier, DE38: All the shit that accumulates by Scott Carle . Read the full post (1857 words, 0 images, estimated 7:26 mins reading time)
I started this little mini rant in answer to a post by a friend about how he had seen the Coast Guard seriously damage or sink US registered boats in the USVI and Puerto Rico in search of drugs etc on the boats of innocent people that had nothing to do with drugs or anything illegal.
This happens but most of the time you are not going to get hammered like this by the coast guard.. it’s not so endemic that it happens all the time. Unfortunately the coast guard is made up of human beings and they are given missions that require a lot of judgment to carry out appropriately. As Ben said you get some young 18 to 24 year olds sometimes that their enthusiasm overrides their common sense. In their defense though… up till the current wars around the world the coast guard saw more action than any other military branch in the US and still do see a lot of action. We don’t hear about it a lot but they are never sure when they pull up to someone on the water if they are going to end up in a shoot out with drug runners out of south America etc… I think that with some of them it leaves them more viewing everyone as a potential danger to themselves when they pull them over than as a routine check etc… It lends itself to overreaction on the side of the Coast Guard in some situations. To be honest we see this in most of our myriad law enforcement agency’s. I would recommend that anyone that this happens to do their best to obtain legal representation and pursue it. It needs to be addressed so that it happens less in the future.
This joke has been around for a long time. I got it in email again yesterday and realized that I got a kick out of it every time I had read it. So it makes the joke hall of fame and gets posted here.
🙂
| The IRS decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to the IRS office..
The IRS auditor was not surprised when Grandpa showed up with his attorney.
| |
1. Fans. I think that fans in the heat of summer can take a boat from an oven to quite comfortable. Also sleeping at night the fans work great while your sleeping. There are currently no fans installed on Valkyr. We made this a high priority and were willing to spend some serious money to put fans through out the boat. Our criteria for the fans was low power consumption and low noise. We tested quite a few fans and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to be cheap but that we were going to go for broke on this one. We ended up buying our fans at West Marine and went with their very top of the line model http://www.westmarine.com/weba…..lassNum=36 you can get them in 12 or 24 volt models. At west marine the retail is $99 but we were able to get 5 of them for $64.95 each. The following site had them for $76.95 dollars each http://us.binnacle.com/p5688/C….._info.html
This is a preview of Things we think make the boat more comfortable to live on and use. . Read the full post (664 words, 2 images, estimated 2:39 mins reading time)
Re-doing the power systems on Valkyr
When we got the boat it had two optima batteries one in the starter bank and one in the house bank. There were two other group 31 Sea Volt AGM batteries sitting on the boat not hooked up. My plan is to use the two group 31 Sea Volt AGM’s along with 2 identical Group 31’s that I have on my old boat to make a house bank of 440 AH. The two optima AGM batteries will go in the second engine starting bank. These are controlled from the stock DC switch panel that has a 1/2/All/Off switch integrated into it.
We ran out of water in the two water tanks. No big deal, we would just get the hose on the dock and fill them. It worked just fine. We filled the first tank. You could tell when it was full as it started to overflow around the deck fill (this is exactly what would happen on my last boat with a water bladder instead of a solid tank. It didn’t have over flow or vent lines). We started to fill the second tank, and kept filling it and filling it… and filling it…. hmmm for some reason it just didn’t feel right. “It’s taking a lot longer to fill than the first tank” was said a couple times. Finally… “umm lets turn the hose off and find out where the water is going to.” When it comes to finding water start at the bottom and work your way up. It loves going to the lowest place it can find! “Hey guys, the bilge has a lot of water in it.” We must have had a hundred gallons or better of water in the bilge based on how long it took the bilge pump to pump it out. About 15 minutes. The slightly scary thing for us about this was that for the last few months the automatic bilge pump was not working at all. I fixed it so that it works manually now and am waiting on the new electronic bilge switches to get here so I can re-enable the automatic bilge feature. Pictures very similar to Bob’s stories about the other boats sinking floated through my head as scary what ifs. It’s not that bad because we don’t leave the shore water connected and we were there during filling the tanks to monitor it and catch that it was taking to long to fill the tank, but it is enough to make you think twice. Until I read Bobs article I was assuming that we had a leak in the tank or a broken vent or something of that sort in the tank. After we pumped out the bilge we weren’t getting any more water like that in there so it led me to believe that it wasn’t a major leak in the tank. When I get a chance I am going to go spelunking on Valkyr in and around the water tanks and get some pictures as best I can. You can see the front of the forward tank from the forward access hatch in the v-berth. There is actually almost enough space to crawl up under there if you were a bit smaller than I am. 
Oh if I didn’t mention it I am moving all the fuel supply lines from where they are now. I really like the functionality of the existing system but there is about 20 feet of fuel line where 3 different fuel lines basically circle the entire engine. Right now the fuel line manifold and single external filter are port and slightly aft of the engine. the fuel lines start at the fuel tank and run down the port side of the engine to the filter and then to the manifold. From the manifold three fuel lines run from behind the engine and up the starboard side of the engine to the on engine fuel pump and to the the parallel electric fuel pump with a return line to the tank somewhere in there.
This was one of the lost topics when I had to change out the forum..here it is with some before and after pictures also.
We are heading to Valkyr this evening to spend the night.. We are going to try some special laminate paint on one of the laminated counter tops to see what we think of a color change from the original brown laminate to an ivory color. We were looking at replacing the laminate with a lighter laminate but this paint looks pretty good on the demo we saw at home depot and only cost $20 for enough that we should be able to do all the laminate surfaces in the boat with it. We figure that since we planned on replacing the laminate anyway that there is no downside to spending $20 dollars to test out just painting it with this new product. We will let everyon
Permanent link to this post (151 words, 0 images, estimated 36 secs reading time)
One of the first things I did on my old boat was replace the existing bulb fixtures with LED light fixtures. It made a huge diffence in my energy budget. I could run 6 led lights and only use the same ammount of or slightly less engergy than one of the old bulbs used. Also there was little to no heat generated by the LED’s which was nice here in South Carolina as it is pretty warm most of the year and it kept a little more heat out of the cabin. The downside of the LED fixtures I got is that they were a cool white color an though they generated a lot of light I never felt comfortable reading by them. I could but you just barely had to strain to do so.
|
|
Recent Comments