Progress!?

Last night the marina got pounded in heavy rain, maybe a little hail, and we sat through one tornado warning. Not sure what one is supposed to do with a tornado warning while on a boat. We huddled in the forward berth figuring that was about the best we could do. Whatever it was that spooked the weather watchers apparently passed to our south. The shore power flicked off for a few brief moments but that was it.

It took a good part of the day but the house battery bank along with the main current limiter and its power cable to the batteries have been replaced. As a result, all of our DC power circuits are working like they should without the lights going dim. It was reported that one of the old batteries was much, much lighter than the rest. All the magic electrical juice had disappeared. Thus the reason for our dimming lights and slow running pumps.

I say “reported” as I stayed out of the way of the young buck doing the repair. Which felt kind of weird. Wiring up a house bank of four six volt batteries into a twelve volt bank falls into the category of “electrical work 101”. But a pacemaker and 68 year old bones, joints, and back lifting those batteries in and out of the hole? They say discretion is the better part of valor. I'm not entirely sure I know what that means but it sounds like a good reason to let someone else handle the physical work. At least I was right about what was wrong.

Still, I am not entirely useless. Tomorrow will be the hunt for the last of the items currently on “The List.” Those being fuel leaks in the gen-set and starboard engine. Could be easy. Could be not so easy. They both appear to be leaks on the high pressure side of the fuel injection system so It will certainly be loud and hot trying to track them down. But as to the rest? Just have to see.

So when will “progress” be measured in miles under the keel rather than items off of the list? Not sure. It doesn't look like there is a weather window for going up the coast for a few days yet. But there is a big “Loopers Gathering” here this weekend. We may just hang around for the party. 

I don't think the mechanic will need to go to the gym after work today.

Out with the old...

...and in with the new.

The burn mark on the plastic cover was there way before we bought the boat.

The corrosion on the current limiter was not.

I loves me some Kady Krogen

Here we don't go...again

Last night before going to the berth, I was working on a writing project with our newly installed salon LED lights aglow. We had done all the pre-departure prep work we could. Come morning all that was left to do was close the hatches, power up the helm station, toss the lines, and go. We were feeling pretty good. But then Deb pushed the button to flush the head. The electric macerator pump groaned but didn't flush, accompanied by all the lights in the boat going out. They came right back on but still, something was clearly amiss.

Our first thought was that we had replaced the seals and impeller in a head pump whose motor was going bad. But while mulling over the fact that our morning's departure wasn't very likely (since an operative head is kind of important) the boat's main water pump came on and the lights went dim again. Then the fridge tried to power up with the same result. There was no choice but to power down the DC panel and, this morning, open another work order.

Once upon a time, I was a pretty good electrical tech. But a pacemaker and stray electricity are not particularly compatible. Also, a reasonable guess is that the house battery bank has gone the way of the engine start battery. Hefting those things out of the hole is another task I probably shouldn't attempt if that is, indeed, the case. No matter what the actual cause, it will, as usual, take some time to gather whatever parts are necessary to the repair. It may also be a day or so before a tech will be available. Weekends, when all the pleasure boaters are out performing their stupid boater tricks, the techs are around to help clean up the carnage. They get Mondays off. So we are going to miss yet another perfect weather window.

While poking around looking for some obvious reason the DC system croaked, Deb noticed that the ship's water system strainer needed cleaned. As usual, cleaning it meant leaking a bunch of water so, when she was done, she went aft to clean up where it tends to pool under the dripless seals near the gen-set. While there, she thought she smelled fuel and asked me to check. Sure enough, the pan in the get-set was, once again, filled with soaked fuel diapers. This time, rather than a low pressure leak at the fuel pump inlet, there appeared to be a leak at a plastic plug at the top of the fuel filter housing. I got about a half turn out of that plug and, as soon as the electrical system is squared away, we will run the generator to make sure fuel isn't leaking from somewhere else.

I've lost track of the list of items that have kept us on this dock. On the one hand, it is getting to be a bit of a challenge to just keep rolling with this seemingly endless string of punches. On the other, what choice is there? The boat is our second home. It needs to be in St. Louis. The only ways to get it there are by water or truck. After trucking Kintala to the ocean I swore I'd never make that mistake again. It was expensive and the boat was damaged. Damage that nearly sank the boat and took several hard days of work to repair. But, if we get delayed too much more, there may not be enough time to get off the Great Lakes before winter. First Light is the definition of the proverbial “slow boat to China”. We really need to start logging miles under the keel pretty soon. “Pretty soon” as in last week.

Putting the boat up on the hard for yet another winter is something we really can't afford to do again. It is expensive in its own right. Worse, every time we do, there is the additional costs of getting it back into running order again. It may turn out that leaving the boat in a yard for six months that wouldn't allow it to be hooked to shore power is what trashed all of the relatively new batteries. Maybe this current (no pun intended) problem is something entirely different that simply popped up in the last couple of days. Who knows? What we do know is that we will be enjoying the Delaware City Marina for a couple of more days, at best. We may yet end up with the truck option, but that is not a decision to make in the midst of a mechanical maelstrom.

There is another thought as well. Within the last 12 hours, two friends of ours have taken serious blows far worse than our mechanical glitches. One lost a Son to an act of violence last night. The other, a member of the LBGTQ community and a good friend, (who was also instrumental in me surviving a cardiac arrest about a year ago) received a hate mail threat that was serious enough to be passed along to the police. Another good friend is still coming to terms with having lost his wife and being badly injured himself in a boating accident.

All we are dealing with is a broken boat that is going to cost us some money and a trip delay or, at worst, a cancellation. Yeah, hardly something to get too wound up about. Drink some coffee. Toast the sunrise. Get on with the day.

Departure Day!

...Or not.

Today was the day to be on our way. All pre-departure check lists run. A review of how we were getting off the dock with the slight current was made. All lines set, water tanks full, shore power stored away. Upper and lower helms powered up, chart plotters loaded with the route, batteries fully charged, everything stowed, all hatches closed.

The port side engine chuffed to life. The starboard side engine... The starboard side engine... Dead slow turn, no start. Emergency battery switch to “Both”. It almost felt like it was going to start but...no Even if had started, is that good enough? The next few stops are anchor stops. Dock fees north of us are also north of our budget. What if it will not start at anchor? Also, this place has maintenance and we know we can trust them. North of us, no clue. And then there is the weather. All indications are that, if we had made Cape May today we would be sitting either there or in Atlantic City for several days waiting out the weather. The larger picture suggests that leaving here today or leaving here a few days from now will not make any difference as to when we get to the Hudson River.

No, that is not my old bones wedged around that engine

It is my experience that it is rare that everything is working on any live-a-board boat when it leaves the dock. Kintala, First Light, friends' and customers' boats. If everything was reported as working perfectly that usually meant that someone didn't know something. There are a lot of things that can be broken that don't make the boat unsafe, but this boat had an intermittent engine so, it was rather seriously broken. Back in my aviation days I had a reputation for flying just about anything just about anywhere it needed to go to get fixed. But even I never took to the sky in an airplane where half the engines wouldn't start. Though, truth be told, I did launch a couple of times with engines that didn't keep running. Fortunately, except for one time, I always had two when that happened. The one time I only had one I was already over an airport. So that was just a glider landing. Anyway...

Leaving the dock in a seriously broken boat going "out there" is just silly. When we are “out there”, moving or on the hook, we are off the grid. Being off the grid and being seriously broken at the same time? Been there. Done that. Going to do my best never to do that again.

I was, shall we say, a little disappointed, particularly when the boats around us stated dropping lines and heading out. Rue the way life unfolds sometimes, but then? Drink a little coffee. Toast the sunrise. Take some pleasure out of making a good if really (really) annoying choice. Suck it up. Shrug it off. Next?

“Next” was getting a mechanic down in the hole. (Yes, a mechanic on a weekend!) Obviously the first step was to hit the starter button so he could hear what had happened. I did. He didn't. The starboard engine fired up almost instantly. So did the port side. Shut them down. Try again. Same result. Are you kidding me? One thing I know for an absolute certainty is that broken things don't fix themselves. I also know that intermittent problems are the worst. 

My original thought was starter or start relay. I have seen intermittent failures of those more times in my life than I can remember. But two starters and two relays at the exact same time? Don't bet on that. 

Another thought was the start battery, though intermittent batteries are a bit of a stretch. The things either have and hold electric juice, or they don't.  Besides, First Light has an emergency start system that ties starter and house bank together. We tried it and it didn't make any difference.

In the time that had passed between us trying to leave and when the mechanic climbed down in the hole, we had hooked back up to shore power. Is that why it started? But that didn't really add up as the boat had been on shore power for days until this morning meaning the battery should have been just a juiced as it was when the mechanic climbed down in the hole. Still, a test of the start battery suggested that it is near, if not a little past, its service life. It will take a full charge but, the instant you put a load on it, the voltage falls away. Why the battery failed early in the morning after being on the charger all night, but not after couple of hours on the charger after the aborted starts?  Beats me.

Another mechanics (two - on a weekend!) jumped in his car and headed off to get us a battery. The lead tech crawled back into the hole and changed the start relay on the starboard side. They had one in stock and the one on the engine looked to be an original part with a few rusty bits. When the battery was delivered I stayed out of the way while the two mechanics wrestled the old battery out and the new battery in. This beat up old bod of mine isn't up to that kind of task down in that kind of hole. With the new parts installed, both engines started just like they should. After a long look at the weather we decided that Monday is the next (planned) departure day.

I have to admit watching the boats parade out of here this morning was a bit depressing. But two of them who are traveling together came back. One of them hip tied to a Tow Boat US due to an overheating engine. His will not be quite as quick a fix as his parts will not arrive until tomorrow.  So, all in all, a trying day that ended up as good as it could. Tomorrow? Who knows?

Land side brains and boats.

As anyone who has spent any time around boats would have guessed, these first couple of days on First Light have been long and busy. We showed up with a full list of things to get done, knowing the list wouldn't fit in the time allowed. First item on the list was figuring out what was gong to remain on the list for this stay and what would have to wait until later. Replacing all the batteries on the boat was on the "contract out" list as an item we had hoped to have on the "Finished" list before this trip. No one familiar with boats will be surprised to hear that plan fell through. It was no one's fault. The tech we hired had a serious family obligation crop up. He recommended a replacement but there wasn't time to get on the new guy's schedule. So "replace batteries" went on the list as something to try and get done in the few days available. 

Day one was spent just finding our way around the boat. Which switches for which lights, "what's this" and "what's that" kind of thing. A couple of hours disappeared taking down and putting up canvas. There is a repair required on the flying bridge that will be structure and glass work. It drew our attention for a while. Bins and cubby holes were emptied, as well as time lost into just looking around trying get a handle on what we gotten ourselves into...this time.

As night drew nigh, and after some consideration, I decided it was safe to put power on the boat even though the batteries were clearly roached. They weren't that old, its just that they had been sitting dead flat for likely the better part of a year.They had come up fine during the sea trail though the voltage had fallen off rather rapidly once the engines were shut down. Essentially we would be running a few LED lights on the DC side of the boat's electrical system, carried by the battery charger. The AC side, fridge, outlets, and power tools like the pressure washer, vacuum, trouble lights, and recharging hand tool batteries would rely on shore power. "Replace ship's batteries" was moved off the current "to do" list and back onto the "contract" out list.

Day two was partly spent in the engine room sorting out priorities and grumbling about the poor state of some of the electrical work. But all appeared to be basically sound. We then dove into the huge locker under the cockpit floor. It was filled to the brim with all kinds of goodies. More fenders (10 so far) two fender boards, dinghy motor, two more anchors plus chain and rode, lines (some still serviceable), and a fish cleaning thing that fits a holder in the cockpit I had found puzzling. (So that's what that thing is for...cool.)

Under that stuff we found buckets full of other stuff floating in water, and a whole load of chemicals that have no business being stored on a boat. Tangled up with all of it were beefy hardware bits that have to do with the fancy tip-the-dinghy-up-on-the-swim-deck system. Another power boat thing of which I have no clue. 

Poking around in the now empty hole revealed a few minor chafing issues with the hydraulic steering gear that were easily addressed. Deb started cleaning and I started sorting. By the end of the day it was all under control. We were happy with the progress but beat right down to our socks.

First thing on yesterday's list was lubing the thru hulls. That required opening up the engine room (engine ROOM!) to find all the various handles. Here Kintala has it all over First Light. With her two engines, two air cons, waste dump, generator, and sink drains, it is a bit scary thinking of all the places through which water is trying to get into this boat. The bad news was that two of the thru-hulls were stiff enough to make it onto the survey MUST FIX list. The good news turned out to be that that one of those is forward in the engine room, just aft of the batteries. As I moved forward toward the thru-hull my nose caught a whiff of something that set off an alarm bell in the mechanic side of my brain. The side that hasn't been particularly busy since we moved back on land. Moments later my ears ramped the alarm up to full %$#$%%%^ ME! mode.

The batteries were sizzling like breakfast bacon and stinking of acid, their cases distended and the tops bulging. The Mechanic side shoved my land side brain out of the way and took over, calling for the battery charger and DC bus side to be shut down right now! It then took to smacking around the land-side of my brain for being near terminally stupid. Dead flat batteries on a full honking charge? Amps surging, generating heat and gas, warping plates leading to a dead short and...ka-boom!

How in the world could I have forgotten that fundamental safety issue? But, somehow, my land side brain managed to do exactly that. 

The next few hours were spent replacing all of the batteries on the boat, four house, one (big) start battery for the engines, and another (normal sized) start battery for the gen-set. The good folks at Duck Creek used a fork truck to lift the pallet full of new batteries up to the bow, then returned to lift the old batteries back down to ground level. One of the young yard guys helped me wrestle the (big) engine start battery out of its holder, then wrestle the new one back in. No way could I have pulled that off by myself. But hauling the rest of them in and out of the engine room, even with Deb's help, put a well deserved hurting on my 66 year old frame. Penance for such a bone-headed act.

Wiring up the new battery bank gave me a chance to correct some other MUST DO items. Adding terminal covers that were neglected the last battery change was just part of the job. Even the land side of my brain knows better than to leave hot terminals uncovered, especially in a machine space. Some of the wiring needed rerouted as well. It is hard to explain but there is such a thing as "happy" wiring. It is easy to spot, as is "unhappy" wiring. The mechanic side of my brain, now in complete control, made the wiring as happy as possible. The rest of the day was spent with the power washer, blasting 2 years worth of grunge off the outside of First Light. My Mechanic brain made notes of things that will eventually be addressed. Most of it cosmetic, some of it not. A mechanic brain, left unchecked, will spend untold hours and oodles of money to fix things only another mechanic brain would understand or appreciate. Non-mechanic brains would scratch their nose and ask, "You spent how much and took how long to do that?"

Truth to tell, I like my mechanic brain a bit more than my land side brain. I have projects again, things that could be done, should be done, and must be done. My land side brain is mostly filled with things that other people insist be done, dictate how it should get done, set (usually absurd) limits as to when it must be done, and are absolutely bonkers about filling out the paperwork that testifies to it being done as demanded. Most of which my mechanic brain would laugh at, ignore, or work around without a second thought. It is probably best to leave my mechanic brain on the boat for now. It is a poor fit for my land side life.

 Today, me still embarrassed, the electrical system was front and center once again. It holds the lion's share of "MUST FIX" items. We contacted the recommended  certified marine electrician who just happened to working on a boat near by. Some of the "MUST FIX" items written in "boat electric speak" needed translating into "airplane electric speak" if I was going to get them cleared off the list. "AC NEUTRAL to GROUND CONNECTION NOTED" made sense after translation. At first I feared a long troubleshooting task was at hand. Such a "short" (in airplane speak) can be an elusive little bugger hiding deep, deep in the wiring harness. 

But do the easy stuff first. A GFCI plug in the galley, actually wired into the "Microwave" circuit breaker, was tagged as kaput. Such an item could also be the source of the noted AC NEUTRAL to GROUND connection. I changed it, copying the wires from plug to plug exactly. Not only was the GFCI still not working, now the microwave was dead as well. Deb, being far smarter and more patient than I, dug into the paperwork that came with the plug and spotted the mistake. The wiring I copied had two white wires crossed. Swap them and everything worked. Even better?  That sneaky little short had disappeared.

Of course there are more wiring glitches to fix. Two will be splicing into main power leads to add over-voltage protection. One at the main house bank to the ship loads. The other at the generator start battery to the starter itself. Somehow both were overlooked during previous surveys. Also, something needs to be done behind the main electrical panel to ensure the AC and DC wires and connections don't try to get friendly.

Those will have to wait for the next visit. Or they may end up on the "contract out" list. At the moment time is more of an issue than funding, Each trip costs at least three days on the road, usually 4. But the long and short of it is First Light is already starting to feel like home. Something making my mechanic brain smile. 

Trying to get going

So there we were, within 36 hours or so of pulling the hook out of the Manatee River and heading off. There was a last day to be spent getting the mast lights on Blowing In The Wind squared away, and getting some play time in with the grand kids. I had long dreaded that last day of play, knowing the heart break that would come with those final hugs before we took the Ding out to Kintala. Best guess was that it would be three days of tears and at least another week of shaking off a grey cloud of wondering just why we needed to be away. After that there would still be intermittent bouts of the grey, bouts that would fade as the months wore on, though never going completely away. But, as it turned out, they were not thrilled at the idea of seeing us sail off over the horizon while they stayed tied to a dock, and so decided to leap in the cruising life themselves and come along.

How cool is that?

Because Kintala can’t fit through the Okeechobee, and Blowing In The Wind’s Captain and Admiral wanted to have a little easer “first go” than running through the Gulf of Mexico to the Keys, the two boats will be taking different paths for the first few weeks. After meeting again in Stuart our little family flotilla will head north.

Kintala was due to leave first with the plan of spending a few days hanging out in places we like to hang out, and meeting some people we would like to meet. So there we were, within 36 hours of pulling the hook out of the Manatee River and heading off.

Right up until we did the morning’s routine battery check. The check doesn’t amount to much, just running through the monitor menu to verify each battery’s voltage. The fancy Xantrex monitor does a whole bunch of other stuff as well, all of which I review, and none of which is very useful. Individual battery voltage displayed on a digital read-out to the hundredth off a volt will tell you everything you need to know about battery health. In the five years these batteries have been in Kintala the morning voltage checks have always been within a couple of hundredths of a volt of each other. This morning…

Battery 1 =12.16v.

Battery 2 =13.23 v.

Rats.



The first step in troubleshooting is to verify what one thinks is wrong actually is wrong. In this case that would mean opening up the battery box and putting a volt meter on each battery. Alas, since we had been working on BIGW’s mast lights yesterday and left the tools on that boat for today’s efforts, my volt meter was back on the dock and not with Kintala out here in the anchorage. A quick run in to say “good morning” and grab the meter ensued. Sure enough, checking with an independent meeter confirmed, battery 1 was down an entire volt from battery 2.

Five year old batteries on a full time cruising boat. One really can’t complain. We started making plans to replace the batteries, figuring we could get back on the dock for a couple of days. Better to do it now than face the music somewhere along the East Coast. But…

Deb kept asking, “Why?” Why this sudden drop. Why today? And I kept answering, “Everything works right up until it breaks.” We are trying to get going. This is a boat. Of course it is broken. Boats are always broken. It is just a matter of how broken.

The second rule of troubleshooting, after verifying the problem actually exists, is to figure out the most likely cause of the problem. And, when it comes to the most likely cause, one might as well start with the last thing someone touched that might have something to do with the system wonk now messing up the day.

Since I wasn’t aware of anything being done that would jostle the electrical system into a wonk, and since the batteries are five years old, and since we trying to be on our way; I just fell into the conclusion that the batteries had decided this was the perfect day to file for retirement. But clearly Deb wasn’t convinced. Even while using the internet to check the prices and availability of various batteries she kept asking, “Why now? Why today?” After a bit she disappeared in the aft cabin and started poking around.

“Found it.”

Found it? Found what?

Working on BITW’s electrical system had her rummaging through all of the various bins and cubby holes on Kintala yesterday. Places where we stash all kinds of do-dads, like wire and connections and tools not often used. Stuff needed to fix BITW’s lights. It is a bit of a pain. Actually, it is a major pain, not being able to just reach into a tool box or easily accessed storage cabinet to get something. I often claim that, should I ever loose my mind and move back on shore, it will be to avoid having to spend 20 minutes digging though cubby holes for the stuff needed to do a five minute job.

Kintala’s battery master switch is located in one of those cubby holes. We rarely touch it. In fact, it probably hasn’t been moved in a couple of years. In the process of searching for stuff Deb had bumped the battery master select switch with a box full of cable, moving in from “BOTH” to “ONE”.  It was late. It had been a long day. She was tired. And the cubby hole was dark and stuffed. As a result last night’s entire electrical load had been sucked out of just one battery.

Of course it was low. We had selected it to be low. We just didn’t know that we had selected it to be low come morning.

So, here we are, within 36 hours of being on our way.

Mystery math

I was hanging dinghy davits on the rear of a good-sized Hunter when a big old power boat stumbled into the next slip over. It was quite an arrival with the boat thumping and bumping off of nearly every piling in sight. The Captain blamed the ungainly landing on his not being able to find neutral on either one of his engines. Fair enough.

A day or so later another tech and yours truly were tasked with finding out why the Captain in question couldn't find his neutrals. It turned out that we could not find them either. The shift levers felt like they were anchored in thick, cold, oatmeal; both stiff and mushy at the same time. We popped the control covers at both the upper and lower helm stations and discovered every single screw in each set loose, allowing the mechanisms to flex and bind at will. Even worse, the clamps at the cable ends at the transmissions were within a thread or two of just falling off, allowing the cables to slip and flex. It was kind of amazing that the Captain managed to hit the slip at all. I haven't a clue as to how such a state of affairs came about. That was what we found when the boat landed in our laps. How it got that way doesn't really matter.

There was an additional puzzle. Though I am not all that familiar with power boat shifting levers, it appeared that some parts were missing; parts that determine exactly where the detentes are felt as the levers move. But the threaded holes where I thought such parts should go appeared to have never had any parts screwed into them, ever. A bit of Internet searching came up with a parts diagram (yeah, I was amazed as well) that listed the missing parts as a “kit”. Apparently not every installation includes them, though it is hard to imagine why. In any case, it looks like the neutrals might really be missing, as in not on the boat at all. Maybe they have never been on the boat. Maybe the design engineer decided that they don't need to be on the boat. There is simply no way of knowing.

Kits were ordered and I would have liked to put them in just to know, but they ended up on back-order. The Captain needed to be on his way so we offered to forward them to wherever when they arrived. And with that he fired up his big old power boat and headed out...all the way to the middle of the yard's basin, roughly two boat lengths.

There he discovered that his starboard engine had refused to start (not sure why he left the slip without it) and that his entire DC electrical panel had died. A bit of a scramble ensued, a small power boat was launched to help corral the wayward yacht while fenders, lines, and poles were brought into play. I watched from the far side of the basin, having been earlier dispatched to check something else on a different boat. When that task was done, I found myself assigned (along with my original partner in the neutral search) to figure out what had gone wrong with the big boat.

While the other tech worked on replacing a badly corroded starboard-side engine ground he had found, I went looking for the DC panel's missing electricity. Turned out it was tucked away in the forward port corner of the engine room, a tight little spot forward and outboard of the port engine. (That was the one that had started. Leaning against it was a mistake I made only once.) Inside a plain looking box were two 12 volt, 100 amp fuses that fed electricity from the batteries to the DC panel. Both had failed under some kind of massive load. As usual, we were working without any kind of schematic, so the exact wiring details were anyone's guess.

Though a couple of people suggested that the corroded engine ground could explain the blown fuses, both the other tech and I were skeptical. Corroded connections normally reduce current flow but, hey, this is the boating industry. Maybe it has its own physics.

New fuses showed up while the two of us were off trying to figure out a reluctant system on a third, unrelated, boat. I bailed on him to put the new fuses in the big boat, which brought up the DC panel. But the starboard engine starter still refused to turn the engine over fast enough to get it running. General consensus was that the start battery was toast.

At this point, I must digress a bit. I openly admit to being a completely anal aviation tech, one trying to be useful enough in the marine industry to fill our cruising kitty. Fixing things is fun enough, but knowing just what was done to fix a thing, and what is was that caused the thing to fail in the first place, is better. When it comes to mechanical things I don't like unsolved puzzles.

I was told to just jump the start battery to get the engine running, but two blown 100 amp fuses not directly involved in the starter circuit was a puzzle that chafed. Things will tack weld themselves at 200 amps; smoke and sparks can get downright exciting at 200 amps. Excitement I wanted nothing to do with tucked in an engine compartment with 2/0 wires running in every direction.

My partner for the day had hit a stopping point on our other project and so joined in. He is good, knows more in general about boats than I do, and is used to working in the blind. Still, he indulged my reluctance to just start jumping things; though I suspect he would have gone straight to jumping the start battery (what we would have called a “smoke check” back in my aviation days). He is also about half my age, but I don't hold that against him.

We put a voltmeter on every battery we could find, both with the battery charger on and with it off. It is a preliminary check that really doesn't do much more than rule out a battery that has suffered an internal self destruct, but that is a good thing to rule out. We checked the voltage drop across the start relay, bypassed the ground half of starter circuit, then bypassed the power run from battery to relay. Nothing appeared amiss, except...

This boat is equipped with an enormous gyro bolted athwart ships to act as a stabilizer. Spinning that thing up has to chew through a noticeable amount of wattage, and it was starting to spin as soon as the ignition for the starboard engine was turned on. Though I don't know much about such gyros, that just seemed wrong, and my partner in crime agreed. A breaker was found to kill the thing. With nothing else obviously amiss we jumped the starboard start battery and hit the switch.

No smoke, no sparks, the engine fired right up. The starboard start battery was, indeed, toast.

Still, the math bothers me. It doesn't seem completely impossible that a dying battery facing the combined loads of an engine start and stabilizing gyro's start-up surge (which does flow through the DC panel), was enough to do in the fuses. Amps can do unexpected things as voltage falls away under big loads. But it doesn't really add up, and I am not convinced that we know what went wonky, where, when, or why. There is no parallel switch on this boat, no battery isolation switches, the battery that has gone toes up is labeled as both a “start” and “house” battery, and there are two other batteries in the engine compartment have no markings at all. Mysteries abound.

But if the boat starts with a new battery and the fuses don't blow, the owner will be happy, pay his bill, and be on his way. A tired battery, two equally tired fuses, a funky ground, some sneaky circuit some where that has a gyro spinning up when it shouldn't? Maybe, in this case, 1+2+1+1+1 = 5.998, and that is all the answer I am going to get.