Monday morning, scooter motored into a sling, and was hoisted free from her natural habitat. As she came up, the hull had a normal amount of green fuzz, the ocean moss and a few barnacles here and there, but nothing surprising. When the bottom of our bulb keel was pulled into view, there was a several-inch layer of pink…stuff. Upon closer inspection, what looked like a coral reef was mussels and barnacles, holding up plants, and other mysteries from the ocean.
When the lift had Scooter over pavement, 3 eels fell out of the forest onto the pavement. I hope they were just new roommates that morning, but I cant help but wonder if they made the previous sail from Port Orchard.
Scooter was pressure washed, and set on stands. Our new home for the next week was pretty much the same as every other week, except we couldn’t use our own bathroom, or our own sinks, and we weren’t allowed to sail anywhere.
The downside of Gig Harbor Boatyard, is they’re pretty restrictive on what projects you are allowed to do yourself. They’d prefer to get paid for all the work being done, and I suppose liability reasons. So the one thing they allow us to do: Buff the fiberglass above the water line. We set about collecting materials and knowledge, and went to buffing.
Buffing was slow. Our boat feels very large when you’re trying to scrub oxidation off of every exposed inch of fiberglass. And to make the process worse, the final result after wax was not the mirror finish we dreamed of.
Enthusiasm for a shiny yacht waned, and we turned our eye to other projects.
All winter, the diesel engine was our ‘main’ failure point. I say that in quotes because this week, we’ve had to come to terms that we may never have our engine at 100% and thats ok. It’s unlikely a 1 knot difference in power will be the thing that kills us.
Anyway, I randomly started asking every boatyard employee for buffing advice and the first guy to entertain my line of questioning eventually said “you’ll have to find someone else, I’m not a fiberglass guy, I’m the diesel guy.” Huzzah. Everyone we told our tales to this winter told us to just get a mechanic, and here was Chris. Tall, lean, seasoned and friendly. Here to help cool off our hot little knocking powerplant. He said he’d take a look and do some research. I got him our engine and transmission’s make, model, serial, favorite color etc. and we were in business.
Chris first had some questions which I proudly was able to report we had thought of last year and checked off the list of possible causes. Mixer elbow: Clear. Saltwater impeller: new. Thermostat: tested & replaced. Heat Exchanger: Cleaned & rebuilt. Radiator cap: new. He climbed aboard and started investigating, and then the fun began. before making any significant progress on Greg (our engine’s nickname) he noticed the hose to our stuffing box was very old and would need replacement.
I don’t even know what a stuffing box is, so I seriously doubt that Chris… Apparently its a little 4 inch section of hose that surrounds our propellor shaft, just inside the hull, that has seawater on the inside, and the boat on the outside and if it fails, Scooter would sink. He mentioned some other projects to tackle while we’d have the prop disconnected so the list was growing.
He had some suggestions about the engine too, but nothing out of the ordinary. some hose might be blocked, the design might be bad, we may be over-propped. Someday I’ll write a long boring post about the engine’s saga, that only this boat’s future owner will be interested in but for now, lets say we’re still chipping away at replacing every part, and are awaiting our next sea trial.
I think the haul-out experience is best told as a two part saga. If only because it’s been 7 days on land, and aside from the first day’s pressure wash and a couple inspections they havent touched our boat. No sanding, no painting, no hull inspections or running gear cleanings.
Here’s to another 7 days on land, hopefully not more.
