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| Fishing Bay at Deltaville VA looking east |
On Friday 15 June we had a very long and generally dull motor from Leonardtown, where the OCC cruise in company ended, back to Deltaville, where we had planned to be hauled out on Monday 18 June. Despite a reasonably favourable forecast, the wind was never quite strong enough for long enough for us to sail. Yet again, the engine sounded very sluggish at the start, if anything, it worse than ever. So, though we had intended to stop overnight at an intermediate location, we decided to do the 55nm passage in a single hop so that we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of additional engine starts.
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| Fishing Bay at Deltaville VA looking west |
With the long motor in progress, we spent much of the time trying to catch up on blogs and home admin, jobs that we had ignored for far too long. Consequently, there are no pictures of the passage back to Deltaville because we were too busy doing other stuff. Lunchtime came and went and we did the washing up, and shortly thereafter there was a brief moment of excitement when we thought that we might be able to sail. We switched the engine off only for the wind to die….. so we fired it up again [Ed: it was hot so started easily]. However, in that short period of near silence I heard the (very quiet) freshwater pump motoring away – never a good sound if you’re not actively filling a basin of water. It turned out that the pressure switch on the pump had failed and, masked by the engine noise, it proceeded to over-pressurised the system causing the pressure relief valve to operate and dump all of the contents of the aft water tank into the bilge! Happily, there was relatively little water in the aft tank so mopping out the space under the pressure relief valve was not a huge job but it was jolly irritating, because we are normally very good at switching off the power to the pump when we are at sea, precisely to stop that sort of water loss. With the problem discovered and the mess cleared up, I fitted the spare pump and all seems well now. It certainly looks like we’d planned the maintenance period at just the right time!
We arrived back in Deltaville just before sunset and then spent the next couple of days preparing BV for haul out. The main jobs were to carry out an engine oil and filter change and to check the alignment of, and connections on, the wind indicator, which, in sympathy with the engine start system, had also decided to come over all temperamental. Happily, the problem with the wind indicator seemed pretty clear – some dirty connections – so hopefully that’s one job ticked off the list that won’t bounce back onto the list immediately!
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| Junior Week at Fishing Bay Yacht Club |
The weekend saw the start of the Fishing Bay Yacht Club’s Junior Week, with hoards of Optimists and some good fleets of Lasers and double-handers all out around the bay. There was certainly no lack of parental support either judging by the number of adults that we saw out on the water, in kayaks and on SUPs, offering advice and guidance and discouraging the little darlings from getting too close to us.
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| Haul out at Chesapeake Boat Works on a 50T travelhoist so we had to disconnect the backstay |
Monday 18 June dawned bright and early and we were ready to be lifted out as soon as the yard could take us. Unfortunately, we had discovered on Friday that there had been a misunderstanding somewhere along the line and the yard had not pencilled us in to be lifted on Monday and had suggested a haul-out first thing on Tuesday. Given that we had a surveyor booked to visit us at 0830 on that day we had spent some time over the weekend speaking to 2 of the 3 brothers who run the Fishing Bay Marina, Chesapeake Boat Works and Stingray Point Boat Works to try to ensure our lift-out at some point on the Monday. Happily, it all came good in the end and at 1545 we approached the travel lift. Adrian did a great job of the lift out, with careful sling placement, even going to the lengths of starting the lift, checking the sling positions, lowering BV, adjusting the forward sling and lifting and checking again. Pressure-washing, positioning and blocking off always takes longer than you think it will and once all that was done we had to set up the fridge to run from a large bucket of water (it’s water cooled), put the fenders and lines away etc etc etc. After all that, a late evening swim and dinner, cooked on the barbecues next to the marina’s swimming pool, were very welcome.
On Tuesday 19 June, the hard work started in earnest. Don, the surveyor arrived at 0830 and spent 3 hours poking and prodding BV and asking lots of questions. Nicky opened, emptied, refilled and closed up lockers for him and answered his questions. I spent most of the time trying not to clutter things up any further and instead cleaned the weed and slime off the hull where the slings had been, ready for preparing the hull for antifouling.
When Don left, Nicky donned protective kit and set to sanding the hull. We had been thinking about painting an ablative antifouling over what was left of the Coppercoat but, looked at close-to out of the water, the Coppercoat generally looks in pretty good nick, with plenty of copper left in the treatment. There are several places where the epoxy was lifting (primarily because the company that put the Coppercoat on didn’t properly clean off the antifouling on BV at the time) but apart from those areas and two areas where the coating is worn very thin, the Coppercoat is good for at least another 12-18 months. So, Nicky gave the whole underwater hull a good sanding and then, the next day, faired in all the lifted areas, ready for patch-painting. It was a big job and, as she posted on Facebook: ‘Today I have mostly been doing an upper body workout, dressed as a Smurf, in (as the Americans would say) 80+degrees of heat. #ratherhot#Iammelting#boatingissoglamerousNOT’!
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| Old starter relay (left). Servicing the Blakes seacocks (right) |
Meanwhile, I started on our most important indoor job – fixing the engine start problem. When we were last in Deltaville, Sam at Hurd’s Hardware Store had said that we could use the store as a delivery address if we wanted to get in stuff that they could not source for us. When the engine start system started to play up, I took him at his word and ordered a new starter motor assembly (starter motor and start solenoid) and also a starter relay (required because the starter motor is so far from the start key which is on the engine panel in the cockpit). These had arrived the previous day and I was very keen to get to work with them. Given that the starter motor assembly is located where it can best be reached by a double-jointed 5 year old with 3 arms, I decided to begin by changing the starter relay. I had actually removed the old relay about a week before because it was so corroded (it had been in the firing line of the water leak that we had on passage from Culebra to Deltaville). However, I had not had a similarly sized relay with which to replace it so I had used a smaller one, but I was keen to put a correctly sized relay in place. Consequently, that was where I began the job…. and, it worked! After replacing the relay I tried starting the engine (just a quick go as we had no cooling water supply) and it fired up quickly and easily first time. Fantastic – and no need for the double-jointed 5 year old impression!
With that job done, I turned to greasing the Blakes stopcocks. That’s always a relatively easy job on the hard when you can strip the seacock down. If you are still in the water you can add grease but there is a tendency for grease gun to squirt grease everywhere but where you want it. However, as we were ashore, the second ‘must do’ job was completed in short order.
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| Muratic acid clean of the blue hull and white stripe – after (on the left) and before (on the right) |
So, it was on to the ‘nice to get done’ jobs. Over the past 15 months or so, since we launched at Kilada in Greece, we’ve been rather poor at doing our superyacht crew impression and have not religiously washed down BV after each passage. Consequently, when we got to Bill and Lydia’s dock, she had an impressive calcium build-up on her and we were well aware that we needed to do something about it. Interestingly, as a result of the incredibly prolonged and heavy rainfall over the time we were in Great Falls, when we returned to BV the calcium build-up had been washed down off the sides of the hull and lay just above the waterline. If only there had been more rain, perhaps she would have been cleaned off properly! Anyway, the calcium needed to go. In Kilada we had successfully removed a lighter coating using neat vinegar and lots of elbow grease, which risked scratching, so here I decided to try a dilute solution of muratic acid (aka brick acid). It was fantastically effective both in terms of ease of application and speed of removal. Unfortunately the photo above doesn’t really show the calcium deposits on the blue of the hull but it does show the brown stain on the white stripe at the waterline which also cleaned off really well.
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| The new protective rubbing strake |
We had planned to relaunch on Monday 25 June but the forecast for that week didn’t look too good for our intended passage north to Newport, Rhode Island, so we asked to lift in again on Friday 22 June. That left only the Thursday for Rick (the brother who run the carpentry and maintenance side of the boatyard business) and his team to fit the stainless steel rubbing strake we had requested. Because of the now very short window of opportunity to complete the work, they pulled out all the stops and did a great job for us. The rubbing strake seems to be standard fit on most US yachts and it will protect the edge of our teak toerail from damage by the piled docks and mooring ‘slips’ which are the normal style on the east coast of the USA. We had admiredDragon Run’s rubbing strake when we had sailed in company with Bill and Lydia and had only discovered later that it was not an original part of the yacht but that it had been fitted retrospectively by Rick. That got us thinking and, happily with the shape of BV’s hull, the edge of our toerail is the widest part of the hull by quite some margin so we had no need for a teak rail to be added – the stainless steel strip could be fitted direct to the toerail making it more affordable and quicker to fit. Five and a half strips plus several hours’ of work later and the job was complete; it looks great!
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| Tidied up, serviced and ready for lift-in |
And while Rick and his colleague worked on the platforms in the sun fittin the rubbing strake, Nicky (dressed as a Smurf once again) daubed black antifouling around on the damaged and thin areas of Coppercoat. It’s not the most elegant look but after a day or so the splotches won’t be seen.
Friday 22 June dawned windy and grim. With a fairly strong onshore breeze we thought it best to double check that all was OK with the engine start system as sitting in slings in a Travelhoist is not the time to find that the engine won’t start; we’ve been there, done that in benign conditions in Kilada and it wasn’t fun. So we tried giving the engine a quick turn over but all that happened was that the starter motor turned over exactly as it should (great, that problem was definitely solved!) but the engine failed to fire. We did all the standard checks – air OK, fuel all the way to the injectors etc etc etc. In the process we even changed the slightly suspect fuel lift pump (manual lever didn’t operate but the engine driven part works/worked fine) and the fine fuel filter but to no avail. By this stage we were very much at the head scratching stage so we asked the yard to call in their tame diesel engine mechanic. Whilst we waited we decided to check the oil level (we had changed the oil at anchor just before haul-out so there was only about 30min usage on this oil). The level looked a little high so we used the pump on the engine to remove some and found that it looked distinctly dodgy – grey when it should have been clear. The oil that we had removed when we did oil change was black and glossy, just as it should be after 200hrs use. We were contemplating the nightmare of contaminated oil (contaminated with what? Water? Fuel? Exhaust gases?) when Mack, the mechanic, appeared. He spent half an hour or so working the starter motor to undeniably blead the fuel system and get fuel to all 4 injectors (no bubbles of air and some impressive squirts of fuel across the cabin) but still the engine wouldn’t fire. A dreaded cylinder head gasket change (expensive) job looked like it might be needed, however, Mack returned after lunch with his pressure tester. Attached to the ‘radiator’ cap and pumped up, the pressure would have dropped if the cylinder head gasket was shot. Encouragingly the coolant system maintains pressure OK but disturbingly he did feel more pressure in the crankcase than normal. So now he/we wonder if the problem is one or several. Could it be that the valves or the injectors or the piston rings are leaking (hopefully not the latter as it will mean lifting the engine to solve the problem) or potentially there’s an additional, unrelated problem with, say, the high pressure fuel pump? In any event the problem is likely to be very expensive and slow to fix. Mack is arranging for spare rocker cover and injector gaskets to be delivered and, when those arrive, he can continue diagnostics by checking the valve clearances, pulling the injectors for bench testing, and carrying out a compression test on each cylinder. We hope he will be able to come straight back next week to try to identify and fix the problem but the yard is a man down on the mechanics’ team, there are plenty of jobs on their job list - we’re not the priority at the moment.
So, our plans of getting to the OCC Southern New England rally which starts on Sun 1 July are pretty much scuppered. With luck we’ll get up there before the rally ends 2 weeks later but we’re not holding our breath on that. The only saving grace is that the engine has died at an entirely non-critical time. It will get fixed and we will launch again (eventually). But it won’t be any time soon. Looks like we’ll have to start on all those jobs we’ve been putting off such as varnishing and catching up on the blog!
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| Deltaville, VA, USA |
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