The final results are in. I have had the boat back out several times now and with the 6 pitch prop it performs the same as the old 4hp engine. With the notable exception of one day it not being able to quite run at 5knots over the water.. I am done with with it. There is something wrong with the engine and I am going to send it back. I have put two months of effort into working with tohatsu on it to no result. I bought this engine because it was supposed to be more 50% more powerful than my old one, quieter and more fuel efficient. It is less powerful, it is almost as noisy as my old one, but the fuel consumption is impressive (better than factory claims i think). All in all though it is a failure it simply doesn’t perform to the factorys specs. The dealer that sold me the engine has never tried to contact me again. I am going to contact the credit card company and dispute the charge today. I really hate doing it but it’s just to much money to accept a product that is so important to my boat that does not perform to the manufactures specs or to my boats needs.
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For some reason I thought I had written up the story of me going up the mast and fixing the topping lift and replacing the bulbs in the perko masthead light with LED bulbs. I couldn’t find them by searching on the site so I grabbed what I had written on http://www.beneteau235.com and am posting it back to my site. Sea Puppy has a perko mast head light unit. It has two bulbs one for steaming and uses two for anchor. I just used two bayonet 12 led bulbs that are a bulb for bulb replacement for the stock bulbs size wise… I was worried that It would not give me enough light compared to the old bulbs but it seems to work.. a friend out with me at night on the ocean this past week when looking or it could see them from 3 or 4 miles away with no problem he said. We went out on La Bon Vie sailing today. It was nice. I took a lot of pictures … so I guess I should post a couple here. Other than that it was just a nice lazy day on the water. Miriam hanging out with me on the starboard side of the cabin top. Orrin and Zsanic Jay on Walkabout Another Walkabout Picture Next morning we left anchor under sail and due to error on my part got into shallows that the rudder touched. We were moving very slow about 1/2 knot. Not much wind and flat other than a few wakes. I dropped engine quickly and just backed straight up when then next wake ripple came by. again no fuss or muss.. It was all very embarrassing though.. second time in two years that I have touched bottom. 🙁 We did the long motor back to the marina and did breakfast with the gang 🙂 actually we were pretty lazy the rest of the day hanging out with everyone at the docks for most of the rest of the day. The night of the 4th this month we went out and anchored out but we left late from the dock.. maybe 9pm… it was very very dark (no moon at all) and all the idiots on the water kept trying out their 10 million candle power spot lights directly on us. We got about 3/4 of the way to the inlet and were winding through an area just past the calabash crossroads when the water depth started dropping and dropping… I thought I was in the middle of the channel when just to starboard the red dayboard marker slid by. This is the dayboard marker that when your on the other side of it you stay about 100 feet away not to get into to shallow water. I was between it and the bank of the island. It passed about 10 feet away on starboard and we could barely see it. Combination of just plain dark dark and our eyes getting blasted by multi million candle power lights. I recently got a question about mounting my TP32 autopilot on sea puppy and here is my reply to it. He had asked about the width and slant on the shim I made to get the cantilever arm horizontal when mounted. I can certainly do that for you if you want but mine is not quite perfect. I can tell you that the widest is between 3/4 and 1 inch thick.. probably closer to 1″ and the thinest is 0″ inches. I will measure it Friday when I get back to the boat and can send it to you the beginning of the week when I’m back off the water. 🙂 We didn’t take Sea Puppy out sailing. Actually we were tired and just heading home but Miriam decided we should just go sailing with Angela on Valkyr if she hadn’t left the dock. 🙂 so we did 🙂 pictures here 🙂
Noseeums invaded in force and we decided to motor back. So it wasn’t a long morning on the water. Went out and anchored overnight behind bird Island 🙂 very nice. Tohatsu USA sent me a lower pitch prop to try on the boat free of charge in their efforts to try and help me with the performance issues I have been having. I got out yesterday and put the new prop on and got some preliminary static thrust measurements. The prop on the engine goes on and off super easy. Pull the pin on the nut and it just turns off with two fingers easy as pie. The prop then comes right off and the new one slid right on. We just turned the boat around so with the engine up I could sit on the edge of the dock and reach the prop with the engine in the up position. Maybe 2 minutes to change it out. In talking with some of the guys on the forums at http://www.beneteau235.com we were recently talking about single handing and tiller tamer setups. As well as other single handing topics. Here are some of my comments on my experiences in that line that I made. Bungee worked pretty good for me for a while 3 wraps around tiller handle. If you have trimmed your sails right and don’t have to much pull on the tiller it will hold course for a while. under power it works even better. Still not great for when a wake hits you and your on the bow and the boat takes off in a new direction. What an awesome morning. I sat in the cockpit with a mug of hot tea and for a very quiet and calm morning start. A little bit later Patty and Jeff showed up on Pirate Girl and I tied them off behind me and went over and had breakfast with them. After Breakfast they took off and headed home. They had had a rough night anchored offshore when the winds kicked up into the low 20knt range. I sailed off the anchor with just the main up. 🙂 I am really enjoying working on my engineless sailing skills. Each time I do this it gets easier and I get more confident in being able to cope with an engine out issue. |
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