Friday, March 29

It Broke

Boat, It Broke, Maintenance

….and Wait to Repair

Well it looks like the boat will not be moving for a while now. This past weekend I replaced the transmission fluid, hoping that might help resolve the shifting issue, as it was a bit low. Plus it needed to be changed as part of the break-in period maintenance. It did not fix the issue, the transmission shifts fine into reverse, but will no longer go into forward at all. It is still under warranty. So for this and some other issues I contacted the installer to repair the issues. They are booked out til the 3rd week in July already, so it will be some time before the boat moves again. In the mean time I work on some interior projects. On a better note, the outboard did not get any damage from the quick dunk it took. It needed routine maintenance anyways and a small oil leak was ...
Boat, It Broke, Journies

It’s a boat…Care and Repair

This past weekend I went up to St Augustine, Florida for the weekend with my Dad to do some sailing in and out of the inlet. The first day I motored north on the ICW to get to St. Augustine and picked up a mooring at the St Augustine municipal marina. The mooring was on the north side of the Bridge of Lions, near the bridge. Next time, and I would recommend anyone that requests a mooring, not have it near the bridge, it was a bit noisy on the weekend, not too bad to make me want to request a move, but in the future I will request something a bit farther away. This being my first cruise on DON’T PANiC some issues came to light. First it was discovered that the engine alternator is not charging the batteries while running. Lucky, I had brought my portable generator to run the AC at night...
It Broke

And the water pump breaks…

Well I am learning that things do break at the worst possible time on a boat. Last night the water pump decided to quite right in the middle of a shower. It’s leaking and not priming. So, I’m in the boat running around naked covered in soap trying to get a bit more life out of it, no such luck. I end up rising off with cold drinking water and screaming like a girl splashing myself with cold water. By the way, no I do not have curtains on the port lights yet, so I may have been providing entertainment to my neighbors…no one said anything the next day. The broken pump is old and discontinued but there lucky there is a newer version that is an in-place replacement for it, so I won’t need to make any modifications to install it. It ended up being a nice improvement from the older pump. I w...