Its alive II...

Not the Beast. It is still slumbering away in its cave waiting on the new raw water pump. The last bit of solar panel wiring was stalled as well, waiting for the post man to show and drop some fancy Renogy solar panel connectors into my hands. Deb was working on taking the front end of the boat apart to check on the holding tank sensor. It has lost its little mind, unable to decide if the tank is full, empty, or somewhere in between. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a holding tank sensor in the first place.

All of which left me poking around, looking for something useful to contribute to the day. Once we get away from this dock the hope is to not be near another for quite a while, making the Dink and its Merc vital pieces of equipment. The Dink has been collapsed, rolled up, stashed in its cover, and nestled in front of the mast. The Merc has been hanging on the rail. Both have been completely ignored since we got to Oak Harbor. It was time to get them back in the game.

The Dink is, of course, just a kind of chubby balloon one fills with air. Except for an occasional cleaning, so long as the air stays in and the water stays out the Dink is basically good to go. On the other hand the Merc has a bit of a history of being, shall we say, temperamental. I used to regard it as down right mental, even a bit evil, but over the last year it had proved itself to be a reliable bit of kit. The only ongoing hassle was trying to keep the idle speed happy. Warm and with the choke off, shifting into neutral would either have it revving like mad or muttering to a stop. The sweet spot in the idle adjustment eluded all efforts to dial it in. Mostly I learned to time the approach so as to coast the last few yards to the dock or boat with the Merc in neutral, either fading away or screaming to announce our arrival.

But our little Dink pusher has been idle for lo these many months now, and experience has taught us that it doesn't like to be idle any more than it likes idling. The better part of a day just hanging around waiting for something to fill it up seemed a good fit for bringing the Merc out of its hibernation.

I replaced the zinc before dropping the motor from rail to transom. After two years there was still some of it left, always a good thing. With just a little effort the dregs popped out of the counter bore making room for a shiny new sacrificial bit that Sister Sea can gnaw at for a while. On the transom the locking pin for holding the motor up out of the water was found to be pretty much stuck in place. A little WD40 and some gentle tapping with a mallet put it back in service. There was still some old fuel in the tank which wasn't likely to help encourage the little motor to wake up, but there was no good place to dump it out. Turning on the fuel, setting the choke, and checking the ignition safety was mostly to see if it all still moved as it should, given that the lift pin had been stuck. It all appeared workable so, almost without thinking I gave the rope a gentle pull, mostly to see if the motor would still turn over.

The little wanker actually popped a little. Are you kidding me? A second pull and it fired up, puffed some smoke, and settled into a very nice idle.

Are you kidding me? I had most of a day to kill and the Merc came to life in less than an hour. I swear I heard the thing giggle at me.

Fortunately, the mail man showed up shortly thereafter. The rest of the day was filled bringing the third solar panel on line. Kintala is almost a magic boat, sucking electricity directly out of the air. Now all she needs is an engine that runs.

And a Bimini cover.

The Beast would appreciate some fresh oil and a new filter.

And some fresh fuel filters.

There are new lights to install in the cockpit.  

But we are getting there.

Really.

Taking it easy ...

The plan for today was to ease back into life on the boat. Deb is still sore from having America's health care system prove to itself that she did not have a life-threatening disease. I am suffering from the post-daughter-post-grand kid visit blues. I admit to being more suited to life on the water than with the steady drum of a house full of children quickly overwhelming my senses. That doesn't mean that being far away from them doesn't make the heart hurt. It will take me a few days to remember the smiles without remembering the good-byes. In any case, the goals for today were pretty modest: get the dink leak fixed, launch it and get the motor running and, maybe, do a little more clean-up work in the inside of our little floating home. 

(Ed Note: The dink leak deserves a special comment. When you have water working its way into your inflatable, don't automatically assume it's a leak in the body of the dinghy. If you have one of those drains in the transom that swivels open and closed, take it apart and replace the diaphragm. The diaphragms on them are incredibly flimsy and tear easily. It's worth a couple bucks and 10 minutes of your time.

I am on record as having nothing good to say about the little Merc outboard that shoves the dink on its way. It has been a constant pain since we first brought it into the family. It has never responded well to sitting and now it has been sitting for a month, untended, unused, and unloved. No telling what kind of fit it would throw at being called back into service. Anticipating the worst I turned on the fuel, eased though four pulls with the ignition off just to limber things up, set the choke to full, took a breath, and gave the cord one more genteel yank. The Merc fired up and settled into an easy idle like it had been running all day. I'll be a son of a skeptic, one freaking pull! No one can ask more of an outboard than that it start up first pull and run like a top.

Feeling pretty good about the world, our reworked Bimini frame caught my eye. We hurried to get the solar panels mounted before heading to cold country, and some of the support tubes I added were just wrong; odd angles, weird aesthetics, funky looking … wrong. Gazing at them in the glow of Merc magic the fix to making them right was obvious. Even more surprising, it actually worked out mostly as envisioned. The only down side was working in stainless. Tubes needed re-cut, a task plus when one is hacking up a lung while cutting with a hack saw.  Also, I don't much care for the Allen head lock screws that are supposed to hold the tubes in place. They are okay so long as the loads are all in compression, but under tension? Under tension I am much happier to see blind rivets instead. That way, pretty much no matter how hard the wind blows, tubes can not be pulled out of fittings, thus letting the Bimimi flap its way into the wild blue. But that means drilling stainless steel tubes and installing stainless steel blind rivets, neither of which is particularly easy when one is working with hand tools in the small cockpit of a cruising boat. (Wood workers have no idea how good they have it when it comes cutting, drilling, and fastening.) Though the job was pretty “easy” it still took the better part of six hours, with wrist and arms now complaining about wrestling steel all day.

Deb, being barely a week out of surgery, was going to take it even easier today. A small load of dishes needed done which is a pretty easy job, so long as the drain actually drains. Kintala's didn't. Deb, knowing that I was elbow deep in steel bits, just dove in and started taking the drains apart. The first I knew about it is when she came up the companionway ladder to show me a drain line completely blocked with some evil looking, vile smelling …. something. A couple of hours later she had the drains fixed and the dishes done, finishing up about the same time I was putting the last rivet in place. So, tonight, Kintala's Bimini frame is much improved, her sink drains are much improved, her dishes are clean, and her crew – in spite of being a bit worse for the wear – is pretty much back into the swing of all things cruiser.

Tomorrow we are going to take it easy. I may even get back to estudiando un poco de español.

Really.

The fix is in ...

Fixing things is a good thing. Maybe not as good a thing as designing a new thing to handle a thing that needs handled, but fixing is a good thing. I like fixing things. I like it more when I know what I did to fix a thing.

The tale has been told how the Merc for the Dink wouldn't merc at all, and right when the need to get off the dock was getting urgent. Flogging it over the course of two days included taking the carburetor off three times. Each time said carb was disassembled, cleaned, and carefully reassembled. After the third time the Merc struggled back into the land of the functioning. It wasn't doing a full merc, but it would merc enough to move the Dink, and that was all that was required to get Kintala off the dock.

So off we went.

Here in Middle River the Dink dock is some 400 yards or more from where the anchor is set. The only way to traverse that 400 yards, particularly against a flowing tide, meant getting the Merc running. That was a witch's brew of full choke, pull 'till it fired, WAY too many revs, no choke, shift, half choke before it died, add throttle - just a  little to WFO - no telling what would be needed, and hold on. An average of three tries was needed to get it all mixed together just right and end up with motivation, and the motivation would come on in a rush. (The reason to hold on.) It was better than paddling and far more exciting, but clearly additional fixing would soon be required.

I put off taking it apart again by hoping that running a tank full of gas juiced up with Sea Foam would chase away what ever little gremlin was still swimming around in the fuel system. I've never actually fixed anything by adding the magic potion, in spite of the claims on thousands of magic potion bottles. (STP, Octane Boost, Bars Liquid Aluminum and - my personal favorite - Marvel Mystery Oil.)  Give the snake oil salesmen their due and besides, avoiding having much needed bits fall to the bottom is more challenging when bouncing around in the middle of Middle River than it is when tied securely to a dock on New River. And if you think about it, hacking away on a Dink motor while bouncing around in the middle of an anchorage is a bit like sawing away at the branch on which one sits. Screwing up too badly means swimming to the parts store. The magic potion couldn't hurt. Maybe it would work.

Things did improve slightly over the course of a couple of days. Sometimes one could get to a partial merc with only two tries at the witch's brew. Clearly half-fixed wasn't fixed enough. We needed a full merc and the magic potion wasn't going to get us there.

This morning the carburetor came off for the fourth time. Once on the bench the same things were seen that were seen the first three times. The same things were done that were done the first three times. And during assembly the same things were checked. I would have loved to have seen, done, or checked something different; but it is a tiny, simple little carburetor with only so many parts.

The Merc is running as well as it has ever run.

Beats the hell out of me what I did to fix the thing.

But I'm glad I did it.

Reluctance ...

As most know by now Kintala and I have one of the more dysfunctional relationships in the cruiser world. We normally battle our way through whichever maintenance / repair / system failure / design disaster is the current focus of our relationship, and reach some kind of uneasy truce. Just occasionally, in those rare moments when most major systems seem to be working, moments when I am not putting bandages on sliced hands or munching aspirin to soothe aching joints after taking another boat-work induced beating, I will admit that it isn't always her fault. When it comes to mechanicing (defined as taking a tool in one's hands and trying to actually make something work that wasn't working before) Kintala has suffered the ministrations of fools, imbeciles, lunatics, hacks, charlatans, con-men, and the occasional honest efforts of those too addled to know which end of a screw-driver one should hold – but giving it their best effort anyway. I have uncovered things so poorly executed they can't even be called “work”, being more like the wreckage one would expect from someone having a seizure while running a chain saw. And while horror stories of fellow cruisers abound, and I share their pain, deep in my own heart I always held Kintala as THE example of what the miscreants of the marine industry will do given the slightest chance. She is the screwed-up boat against which all other screwed-up boats can be measured. Their owners can take solace in the fact that, at least, their boat is not as screwed-up as this one.

But, as of tonight, I am reluctant to admit that Kintala may not be so bad. Those who twisted her mechanical soul into the diabolical mistress that hounds my working days are not, it turns out, the very worst of their breed. Indeed, there is one out there so utterly incompetent, so savagely incapable of rational thinking or an honest effort, that no device anywhere could survive the touch of his hand. It is a story I would not believe were it not told by Friend Bill, a true boat guru, and told in his own unique way. You can find the tale here:

http://veranda422.blogspot.com/

Kintala, by the way, is resting in one of those rare moments where most of the important stuff seems to be working. Her dink, on the other hand, is not. After a long day of cleaning, prodding, de-fueling, re-fueling, oil changing, and prodding some more, the Merc on the Dink refuses, once again, to run. This is a bit of a problem given that the hours are counting down to us leaving this dock and going back to the hook and the mooring ball life we love. Dinks are kind of important when land is a few hundred to a few thousand feet away. Tomorrow is a “must get it done” day … again. Fail and the hook and mooring ball life will be full of rowing and struggling against wind and current. And yes, I know it is the carburetor. It is always the carburetor. It is the carburetor for everyone, all the time, and the Internet is full of rants against these sorry excuses for engines. Engines offered by one of the “very best” of the marine industry giants. Engines that have to be nursed like the dying, susceptible to the slightest hint of a bad diet or coming cold. “Robust” was clearly not part of the design goal. Nor was reliability. But hell, slap some advertising on it and sell it.

We had go-carts when I was a young gear-head. The “bad boy” carts had 10HP engines. Most of us could only manage 5. Younger Brother and I ran a salvaged lawn mower engine bolted into a once-upon-a-time wrecked frame. The thing would hardly go in a straight line. It had marginal brakes, no suspension, and a single gear. But pull on the rope and the motor would start. It didn't matter if it had been sitting all winter. It didn't matter if the gas was old and smelled a little funny. Sure, sometimes we had to clean a spider web out of the vent line, or poke a pencil through the gas filter, but a couple of kids in a couple of minutes could usually coax the thing to life before Mom called us in for dinner.

I am damned sure that thing didn't have a Merc in it.

(Said Brother, by the way, turned out to be a truly gifted mechanic who has spent most of his life repairing some of the world's largest and most powerful mobile cranes. Pieces of equipment where the cost of down time is rung up in thousands of dollars per MINUTE. He is, and I am not kidding, a Wizard. I wish my hands held half the talent of his.)

In spite of the need to get the Dink Dinkable, this afternoon and evening were taken with another gathering of the little community that has formed here. Mizzy and Brian, Keith and Katrina, Ron and Marry Beth, Deb and I, and Craig, will all be leaving as soon as we can. Frank and Audrey, and James, will be staying. For them, this is “home”. For the rest of us “home” is “out there”. The gatherings reflect the tribe's reluctance to say that last “good-bye” to people who have become good friends.

This summer, and this first year, are nearly over.