And Yet More Boat Jobs

April 13 – 20

This post is going to be a list of boat jobs that have come up recently. Not so exciting. I won’t be hurt if you don’t read to the end. 😉

Every time you are going to start your engines, you check a number of things. One of those is the fan belt. I noticed the belt was a bit loose on the port side so I tightened it by loosening the alternator bracket, moving it farther to the outside and tightening the bracket. Then I noticed a new noise and found that, with the alternator pushed farther out, it scrapes the fan belt cover. I guess that means the belt has stretched and it is time to replace it. Getting the new belt (yes, I have spare fan belts) on was challenging but I got it to work.

The fresh water we use on Calista comes from salt water going through our reverse osmosis system. This is a noisy and power hungry piece of equipment but it is critical to our life on the boat. We bought a system from a small company in San Diego called Cruise RO (as in Reverse Osmosis). They have good prices, but more important, their system is built from standard ‘off the shelf’ components where most other RO systems are full of proprietary parts that are VERY expensive to replace and need to be shipped internationally from the company that made the water maker. The other BIG advantage of Cruise RO is that their customer service is lengendary. I have emailed Rich Boren, one of the company founders, on Sundays, on Christmas Eve, and just this week. He ALWAYS gets back to me within an hour or two if it is not the middle of the night.

We have started having troubles with one of the pumps the system uses. The system is still working, but sometimes I have to turn it on and off a couple times to get the ‘boost pump’ to keep the water pressure in the right range. Rich has been very helpful in giving me tips and things to try to keep it going. I will be ordering a new pump but shipping will take some time so I will have it sent to Tonga. I hope the old pump lasts until then.

We had quite a few days with lots of wind. At some point our ‘courtesy flag’ halyard broke. I had to go up the mast to fix this. This entails me sitting in a seat that is tied to the main halyard and Peggy using the winch to pull me up. This is usually not too hard because we have a motorized winch we can use. But its motor stopped working a week earlier so Peggy had to manually winch me up. It’s still very safe, but a lot more work for her. Fixing the winch motor is now another item on my list.

We have had some damage on the main sail, right where the bolt rope fits into its slot on the mast. Near the top of the sail, some of this has torn and needs to be repaired.

I took some photos and went into a sail repair shop. It was a small job and only made sense for her if I would bring the sail to her but that was way too much work. So she advised me on how to do the repair myself and sold me the material. I had not done this type of repair before. It took me a little bit of practice to get the hang of how to do the zig-zag stitching by hand but after a bit I think I got pretty good at it and ended up being quite happy with the repair. And it is another skill I now have. Always a good thing.

When I was getting the engine running after the salt water flooding, I burnt out the starter motor. Luckily I had a spare (actually two!) and replaced the burnt one. When I opened it up, this is what I saw –

There were loose pieces of something that looked like a shreded fiberglass tape. I picked out quite a bit of it.

After removing the shreded tape and putting it all back together, it seems to run OK. I’m not really sure if the starter motor needs that tape but it does seem to run OK (for a short test) without it.

On April 15 we were woken up by our anchor alarm. This goes off when Calista has moved further than a set distance from our anchor. Its really scary when it happens because it could mean you are about to run aground or hit another boat. We had anchored on a sandy finger that was surrounded on 3 sides by much deeper water. During the night, the combination of wind and current had spun the boat around and dragged the anchor out into the deep area, too deep for it to reach the ground (we had about 175 feet of chain out). Luckily we were in the lagoon and there was quite a ways we could drift before hitting anything and if we had gotten close, our anchor probably would have caught the bottom. Still, it was very scary. We turned on the engines, pulled up the anchor and reanchored. It was just after dawn and we knew the area really well so getting the hook down again was not a problem. But still, that is NOT the way we like to start the day!

Next post will be about our final days in Raiatea and Taha’a and reconnecting with an old friend.