Year Two Weblog

[SteveLyle]

An implied obligation, (or theat, depending on how you look at it) of posting “My First Year Weblog” (available on this message board, finding it is left as an exercise to the student, although I'm sure Stu will provide any help anybody needs) here: http://c34.org/bbs/index.php/topic,663.msg2832.html#msg2832), is to post updates.  So here’s “My Second Year Weblog”.

My objective for the second year was to put less work into the boat (figuring that less would be needed, given all  that got done in year #1) and more time into sailing.  My objective was half met, in that less work got done, but I fell short of using the boat as much as I would have liked.

To recap, “Sewanee Belle” is hull #75, a lightly used fresh water boat, built in 1986, that suffered more from neglect than anything else when we bought her in the fall of 2001.  The first year saw the following get done:
-   engine harness upgrade
-   alternator bracket upgrade
-   replumb the fuel system, put filter before lift pump
-   remove the fuel pick-up strainer
-   install a Balmar voltage regulator, dialed down alternator output
-   replace opening port lenses and gaskets
-   remove, rebed, and replace the opening ports
-   replace the fixed cabin windows
-   replaced the stbd cabintop winch
-   added a Harken roller furler
-   rebedded the vented stanchions
-   installed GFI AC outlets
-   repainted the mast, spreaders and boom, inspected/replaced/rebedded all mast hardware
-   replaced the halyards
-   refinished external teak trim
-   refinished sole
-   stripped and refaired keel
-   stripped off old name and installed new name
-   replaced shower sump drain hose
-   installing an exhaust hose and through-hull for the bilge pump
-   installed new instrument transducers (d/s/w)

In addition to the normal winterizing/spring commissioning work.

The work for this year included:
-   replace reefing blocks at aft end of boom
-   replace the vberth hatch support bracket
-   building an instrument binnacle at the helm
-   installing a Raymarine ST 4000+ autopilot
-   integrating the instruments, GPS, and autopilot
-   through-bolting the traveler
-   converting the stuffing box packing to Goretex
-   improving the rig tuning
-   installing a float switch for the bilge pump
-   installing 3 AGM batteries (2 house/1 engine)
-   building a winter cover

The list would have been longer, but there (sigh) simply wasn’t the time.  Too much to do at work.  Oh well, when I retire in about 15 years I won’t have that excuse.

The good news this year is that last year’s work made the boat safe, presentable, and very sailable.  This year’s work was more ‘elective’ in nature, just ‘taking it to another level’ for convenience, and ease of maintenance.

Springtime is the blustery season on Lake Ontario, and with the tall rig Pam and I get plenty of reefing practice.  First time out this past year, however, it was all I could do to haul in the clew reef line.  A quick inspection indicated that 17 years of UV rays and reef line forces had worn out the sheaves on both of the clew blocks.  A quick call to Garhauer (be sure to ask for Quido) got new blocks, which work like a charm.

Hull #75 has the solid v-berth hatch.  The adjustment bracket looked original, and like it was fabricated by Catalina â€" two sheet metal u-channels with a captured square nut and bolt to lock them.  This didn’t work very well, you had to line up the channels, loosen the nut/bolt a bit, but not too much, etc.  It turned out that the ‘std’ West Marine hatch adjustment bracket was a ‘plug-in’ fit â€" the arms are tubes, so alignment isn’t an issue, and the locking mechanism is smooth and quick.  A very simple swap-out and a big improvement.

The major project this year was the combination of building an instrument binnacle at the helm and installing the autopilot. 

First up was selecting the autopilot.  The two options were the Simrad Wheelpilot WP30 and the Raymarine ST 4000+MkII.  A question posted to the message board got recommendations for both.  There were reports of Wheelpilot problems, but some research indicated that Simrad had a product design problem that they had addressed, and more recent models worked fine.  The Simrad was self-contained (no separate fluxgate compass), a little more powerful, and a little less expensive.  The Raymarine had a display head that conveyed information that the Simrad couldn’t, and seemed to be more commonly installed by C34 owners.  Ultimately Defender settled the debate for me with an offseason sale on the Raymarine for less than the Simrad. 

Last year I had installed a set of Nexus instruments, but had never mounted the display â€" I just ran the cable back into the cockpit locker, and would hand hold the display whenever I needed information.  For navigation I used a handheld GPS (Garmin GPSMap 76), which worked great, but went through batteries pretty quickly, and I had to pick the GPS up (I generally hung it on the throttle) whenever I wanted to check my course.  What I wanted was a small panel at the helm that I could mount the Nexus display, the GPS, and the autopilot display, and facilitate linking them together and powering them.  I looked around at instrument housings and mounts for pedestal guards, but couldn’t find one I liked in terms of matching the instruments I needed to mount, and I thought that all of them were way overpriced (I know, pretty much a given with sailboat gear, but I guess after a couple of years of just paying what was asked I was building up a resistance).

I’ve got a table saw and router table in the basement, and decided to use them.  I designed a binnacle that was basically a rectangular board bolted to the pedestal guard, with another board at a 45 degree angle on top of it to hold the three instruments.  Panels on the sides and back enclosed it.  The Nexus display went on the port side, the GPS in the middle (velcro’d to the panel, on top of a cutout through which the power/network cable fit), and the autopilot control/display on stbd.  Since it was a prototype, I built it out of pine, but after a couple of coats of polyurethane, it looked so good I’ll probably hold off building another one out of teak or Starboard.

I ran into a couple of interesting challenges with the GPS.  The Raymarine owner’s manual specifies the NMEA commands that the autopilot needs to get from the GPS.  When I hooked my GPS up to my PC to see what commands it was spitting out, I didn’t get the ones I needed.  A quick trip to the Garmin web site indicated that I probably wasn’t the only one with this problem, they had a software update available to download to the GPS that would enhance the NMEA interface to optionally output the commands I needed.  So after a quick software upgrade, my GPS was all set, putting out the right NMEA commands.

The next challenge was to physically connect it to the network.  The Nexus server for my instruments supports both an NMEA input stream and an NMEA output stream.  So I needed to pipe the GPS data to the server using the NMEA input connection, then take the NMEA output from the instruments and route it to the Autopilot.  Some configuration of the Nexus server allowed me to choose the NMEA commands to output, and it had enough flexibility to pass the GPS and wind information to enable the autopilot to steer to either option.  In addition I could pass basic speed and depth info to the autopilot so that I could display that information on the autopilot display head as well.
 
Garmin sells an (overpriced, of course) cable that plugs into the back of the GSMap 76 to enable all this networking to take place (and to get external power to the unit).  The problem was that the Garmin cable takes a 90 degree turn at the plug, so that the cable is led parallel to the back face of the GPS.  This interfered with the hole in the binnacle through which the cable passed.  So I needed to build my own plug that would be ‘inline’ with the cable.

It turns out that this is a fairly straightforward thing to do.  There’s a guy by the name of Larry Berg who thought Garmin should offer plugs without cables, for people (like him) who wanted to make up their own.  When they wouldn’t, he did.  If you ask him, he’ll send you a couple, complete with gold plated contacts, that you can then use to build your own cables.  If you like them, then you send him some $’s to pay for them.   He calls it a ‘share hardware’ project, much like computer shareware.  At last count he’s shipped over 380,000 of the things in 7 years.  Do a Yahoo or Google web search for ‘Garmin plug’ and you’ll find him.

Anyway, I ordered a couple of plugs from Larry, sliced one of them up to eliminate the 90 degree turn, soldered a 4 conductor cable to it, epoxied the whole thing together, and was all set.

It took a couple of days at the boat to run all the cables through the boat.  On the inside of the binnacle I mounted the autopilot compass, and a couple of terminal strips.  I ran the Nexus cable (the server is mounted behind the port settee), a cable for the GPS NMEA data, a cable for the autopilot NMEA data, and a power cable from the panel underneath the rail behind the panel, through the head, into the cockpit locker, out the aft end of the cockpit locker, over to a hole I drilled through the pedestal guard mounting bracket.   It was a bit of a tight fit in the pedestal guard, but eventually everything got where it needed to be.  The cables come out of ¾” holes I drilled in the pedestal guard â€" which also went very easy.

So now I’ve got all my instrument and navigation data right at the helm, and can let ‘Otto’ steer to a waypoint, wind, or heading whenever I want a break.

After that everything was pretty simple.  Early boats had the traveler screwed to the cabintop.  After a few of them were actually ripped out in a heavy breeze, Catalina through-bolted them on new boats and provided upgrade kits to the older boats.  #75 had never had the upgrade kit applied, so I took care of that pretty easily, a call to Catalina got the bolts, a trip to Home Depot a long ¼” drill bit, and I was all set.

When I took possession of the boat and checked out the stuffing box it had (surprise) one continues strand of flax wrapped around the shaft 3 times.   I converted it to the $50 ‘green goop’ dripless stuffing, then found out about the dripless Goretex stuffing for about ¼ of the cost of the green goop.  And no mess.  So I switched.  It works so well, I don’t know why anyone would use anything else, or go to a different type of stuffing box.

Last year my rig tuning was a mess.  To straighten it out, I purchased a Loos tension guage.  I got to use my engineering statics knowledge to figure out how to apply it to get my forestay tension right.  That’s a long story that’s covered in the February, 2004 Mainsheet, C34 Tech Notes section (some of this other stuff, particularly the instrument binnacle story, will probably show up there eventually â€" that’s when you’ll get pictures so you’ll actually know what I’m trying to describe).

The bilge pump float switch was the last step in a saga that started 17 years ago when Catalina installed a pump in the bilge, wired it up to a panel switch, but never installed an exhaust hose or float switch.  The exhaust hose I did last year, the float switch this year.  No more bilge pump weblog stories (I hope).

On to the AGM battery upgrade.  I put in a new wet cell starting battery last year, but didn’t check the electrolyte level often enough (it’s so darn hard to get to the thing…), and basically ruined it.  I don’t think it liked getting all the amps from the alternator, either.  The solution was to replace all the batteries (the house batteries were on their last legs) with AGMs.  Interstate batteries sells a good Group 27 AGM for not much more than $100, much less than the chandleries.  So no more electrolyte checking.   I still want to install a combiner or Echo charger or some such so reduce/eliminate the possibility of overcharging the starting battery, and simplify switch management.  But no big deal for now.

Finally, the winter cover.  As you may know, I love varnished wood on boats.  I’m willing to pay the price in labor.  And the newer varnishes are quite tough.    But what I found in the first winter with my refinished trim is that varnish vs direct exposure to a Rochester winter is not a fair fight.  The real problems were horizontal surfaces that ice would build up on.  What I needed was a relatively inexpensive and simple winter cover that would protect the wood, the deck, and the cockpit from as much of the UV, snow, ice and rain as possible.
 
I based my design on a couple of articles from the Practical Sailor web site that describe a sailboat winter cover for a ‘mast up’ configuration.    With simple 2x4 carpentry I built a boom extension to the bow and stern, so I had a solid ridge line with the mast in the middle.  I purchased 2 ‘blue poly’ tarps, the stern was 20*25, and the bow 20*20.  I slit them by 4’ in the middle (at the front edge of the stern tarp and the aft edge of the bow tarp) so they fit around the mast and overlapped by 8’.  I removed the lifelines from the stanchions.  I removed the shrouds from one side of the boat (my mast is keel stepped, and it was a calm day), and slit the cover at the stanchions so it fit over them.  Then I cut slits in the cover for each shroud, passed the shrouds through the cover and reconnected them.  I did the same to allow the topping lift and backstay to pass through the cover.  Finally I cut a 4’ slit at the front edge of the bow cover to fit past the forestay.

The bow slit I ‘sewed up’ by gathering the two cut edges, rolling them together a bit, piercing the cover below the ‘roll’, and inserting wire ties through the holes and around the ‘roll’.  I did this about every 6 inches or so.  At the vertical seam in the bow and stern, I rolled the loose material up and did the same ‘wire tie’ sewing job, this time with just a couple of ties.

The bottom edge of the cover was either tied to the opposite edge, passing the line under the boat (at the bow and stern) or tied to the cradle (at the midship grommets where the keel was blocking access to the other side of the boat).  For a few days I used weights (gallon jugs filled with water)  to hold down the cover instead, but these tended to either put too much tension on the cover, or not enough. 

From the same website where I got the tarps, I got vinyl ‘tarp tape’ and grommets.  I taped all the edges where I cut the tarps, and added grommets to relieve the strain, to enable tying the tarps to the boat at strategic points (such as at the mast, or at the bow), and to close up the larger cuts at the stanchions (especially the gate stanchions, which require large cuts to allow the cover to pass over them).

What I’ve got is a cover that isn’t perfectly water tight, but does protect the deck from UV, the deck and cockpit from snow and ice, and makes it easier to do work on the deck during the winter.  Removing the lifelines enables the cover to go down to the rail, giving a sharp enough angle from the rail to the boom to shed all of  the legendary snowfall that western New York is prone to get (over two feet so far, only about 8 more to come).

That’s it for Year Two.  Hopefully Year 3 will see more sailing (we got out about 20 times, but no long trips this year), and more improvement projects.  Some of the ones on my list:
-   solenoid controlled glow plugs
-   a solenoid wired into the low oil pressure buzzer, to turn it off when heating the plugs, the ’20 second whine’ really bugs me
-   gelcoat repairs
-   a more powerful AM/FM/CD player and cockpit speakers

but really, this boat is very good now, and close to being perfect for how we use her.  Then it’s ‘just’ a matter of maintenance (engine mounts, exhaust riser…..), and there’s always plenty to do there.

So if you were wondering how Year Two went, here’s your answer, and if you weren’t, you’ve spent way too much time reading this far.

In any event, Happy New Year, fair winds and calm seas to you all!

Steve