Day in the engine room

Sunday 26 Apr, KY day 43: Lots of small jobs today. But first of all we remove the stern line to the buoy and let Cloudy swing back to the wind now that’s it’s clocked around to the ENE. And the wind has also dropped, so the big sunshade goes back up. Or, for today, it’s more like a rain shade. Yes RAIN! Real rain for the first time in 43 days here. Up till now the best we had was just a few droplets to tease us. So nice to have cloud and rain. Oana even declares she could live with rainy days like this for a week. It’s true, we have kind of had enough of endless hot sunshine.

First job today is back in the engine room. There is a small and troublesome brass elbow that connects the engine raw water system to the stern gland for lubrication. 18 months ago this elbow snapped off – luckily by me nudging it, otherwise it’s the kind of stupid thing that could sink the boat if it had broken off without us noticing. And here we are again, the fitting has gone pink again, indicating dezincification, just 18 months from new. Dezincification where the zinc content of the brass is leached out by electrolysis, making the brass dangerously brittle. As I remove the fitting, the top of the thread breaks off, so it has indeed gone brittle. But I don’t have a spare elbow on board, so all I can do is to clean it up and put it back for now. I’ll have to keep a very close eye on it until I can get a replacement. And I’ll have to work out why that particular fitting gets so much electrolysis. Maybe I should wire it to an anode?

Next job is to fit 2 of our old Hella fans into the engine room to keep me cool when working in there. It’s a pretty straight forward job to wire them into the lighting circuit – and I wonder why I haven’t done it before now. It’s so nice to have air flow on me.

After that I move to the watermaker cupboard. The solenoid operated flushing valve seems to be leaking. After making water it will automatically back-flush the system with fresh water via this flushing valve. And after 5 minutes it shuts off. Well, it no longer completely shuts off and our fresh water continues to flow through the system then into the sea. I have to shut it off manually. The valve probably needs a simple seal replacement, and I start to take it apart. But then, thinking of my disaster at repairing the Caframo fans yesterday, I think better of it. Right now I can still operate the system. Where as if I bugger up this flushing valve without having a spare one to hand, we won’t have a working watermaker. So that one goes on the To Buy list and the repair is shelved for now. But while in the cupboard I tackle a few corroded fittings that have been catching my critical eye lately. They get cleaned up and coated with T9 for protection.

With jobs done we relax in the evening. Oana reading and me discovering the YouTube channel Sailing Uma. Due to our usual weak internet I don’t normally watch youtube. But this channel really caught me. I had thought I was quite practical on the boat. But this young couple are amazing. They rebuilt their 50yr old boat that was about to be scrapped and now they have completely electrified it. In that even the boat motor is now electric. They clearly pay their bills via their youtube revenue, but it’s refreshing to watch a sailing channel with no drama, self promotion or titillation to attract their viewers. I like them.

Tomorrow should be a fun day. We intend to lift the dinghy onto the foredeck and start templating it to make a Sunbrella tube protection cover. It should be the last sewing project. We will be out of material after that!