Captain's Captain

My dad was in town, so we went down to the boat. He recently got back from sailing from Baltimore to Charleston to Bermuda and back to Baltimore on his 40 foot yawl. Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about sailboats.

We didn’t take the boat out; instead, I had a list of things that I wanted my dad’s help with on the boat. We crossed some items off and uncovered other items:

• The throttle has always been extremely loose on Peregrine. You have to hold it in place, otherwise it will vibrate down to lower RPMs. We opened up the pedestal and tightened a small screw on the throttle.
• As mentioned in previous posts, I was having trouble shifting the engine from neutral to forward. On opening the pedestal, we did not see any evidence that the shifter was being blocked. We then opened up the engine and found that the shifter cable did not have enough travel for shifting to forward. The cable can attach at two places to the engine, so we moved it to the other position which gave the cable more travel for the forward position. The shifter on the pedestal is no longer horizontal when in neutral, but I can now reliably shift into forward. I think that’s a fair trade.
• We identified some issues with the seawater intake on the engine. It’s missing double hose clamps, and the seawater filter is on backwards (In and Out are reversed).

• The prop shaft coupler’s bolts are not seized. It’d be very bad if they were to come undone.

• I really hate not having a necessary tool when I need it. Some tools that would’ve been helpful today: adjustable wrench, smaller wrenches for the engine, needle nose pliers, a small socket set, and electrical tape.
• We spent some time trying to understand the boat wiring. It’s definitely a mess (see the picture in this post), but we were able to figure some things out. The clamps are connected to the solar panels. There are some old switches on a board in the starboard cockpit locker that are not doing anything anymore (although one of them was connected to the battery and had poorly electrical-taped exposed wires!). Each battery has a switch to turn on a voltage meter. These switches were off when they were flipped up, so my dad flipped them the correct way.

• One battery has continually had a low voltage (<11 V) and can’t start the boat. The solar panels were putting current into the battery, and we could not identify any electrical sources draining the battery. The current hypothesis is that maybe it just needs to be charged.
• I brought a mask and fins to check out the propeller. It was covered in barnacles. I scraped a bunch off, so hopefully that will fix the boat’s slow motoring speed. I had been having trouble getting the folding prop to flip open when going from neutral to forward. I had assumed that the prop was poorly lubricated. However, it seemed to be lubed fine when I went diving on it. Perhaps this is just how folding props work. I would love to sell it and get a fixed prop this winter.

When we left the boat, I had a list of things to buy, improvements to make, and more knowledge.