Cool it!

   Its been getting hot in here. the days are in the 80's and the temp in an uncooled, closed up boat with teak decks can climb into the 100's. The bad news is our AC was on the way out, and now its dead from the dock power issue. I went and got a new start solenoid, to no avail. The start coil was dead as far as I could tell, and the unit was in bad shape mechanically anyway after 20 some years.

Timing (and Christ) were on our side again. I needed an 18,000 BTU unit to replace our main. I started to look online at the usual places. Then I checked the local craigslist. There was a newish unit here in town!!! $550, with pump and all. I investigated by only sending an email. I waited 3 days before heading off to sailors exchange. When I got to the exchange I asked about getting a unit, I was told there was a unit that did cooling only on the shelf for $600. Bummer, because we need heat as well. Just so happened as I was doing my regular deal browsing I was approached by an employee. He told me he had a unit for sale and once he described it, I knew it was the one on craigslist. We got to negotiating, and when we were done he was going to keep the pump I didn't need, deliver it, and the unit was mine for $350. WOW!!!

 It worked great until a few days ago. It was a really nasty hot day, and it just could not keep up. Then came the error message for overpressure. This basically means there is not enough water flowing to cool the refrigerant. So I took my little cleaning snake, and I ran it thru the tubes, in a 90 degree cabin. Nothing. Then I reversed the flow. It worked! now the unit is flowing nicely, along with the aft AC unit. And in the first hour the two working together have dropped the temperature at time of writing to 82. we will see how it holds out in the long term. Even if it breaks, being a new digital unit, it will be worth fixing.

The new unit is actually smaller in size. It looks like it was just designed in a better way, but with newer technology also so the compressor is smaller. The compressor does run very very hot, not sure how the old one ran, but ouch, its hot. Now I just need a way to utilize the extra room that is left over. I still have to secure it, and because its not 100% yet, I am waiting until I know its all done, before I secure it once and for all. 

Busy Busy Busy

   Wow, no updates in a long time. Sorry. So we have been busy saving money for the trip, and at the same time I have been working on repairs, small repairs, major changes, and major rebuilds.
Where to begin. Ah yes, the generator.

   I for a long time had been looking for a generator. I had made about 15 calls in about 6 months. I had spent a lot of time online, reading stories of failures, reading what people hate about the generator they have, what do they love about it. I eliminated one from the start. I would not buy a 3600RPM unit. They are very loud, and vibrate a lot. In fact the one we had was 3600, and for the short time it worked for us, I found it very loud.
The next item on the list was what power we needed. I found a slew of 8000 watt units, I quickly realized with everything on the yacht running we only can use 5000 watts, if we try very hard. So 8000 to do simple things at sea like charge batteries, make water, make hot water, was overkill. I realized on most ocations we would use no more then 2500 watts, only using slightly more on very hot, humid, windless nights to run the AC unit. At 1600 watts when running it is the single biggest power consumer on the yacht. We have a second AC unit as well. It uses 1200 watts. so with just those two running for a nasty night we are looking at 2800 watts.
The next issue was fuel usage. The very slow 1800RPM units have a big displacement. the fuel usage I read about was in the 0.5-0.8GPH range. However I heard about one more generator, with a Kubota engine that ran at 2400RPM.
The smallest unit that has been made, and made well, was 2500 watts. these are very rare. I however found I could buy a new unit from Phasor that was 3500 watts for only $4500. This is a 2400RPM unit, properly fresh water cooled, and the fuel usage was 1 gallon of diesel every 5 hours under 1/2 load. 1 gallon every 4 hours under full load.
30 Day FREE amazon prime membership!!! Sign up now for this special trial. Cancel anytime.

So begin my search for a Phasor Generator. Every day I scan the boat classified listings for things that are a great value, and snap up any I can find and I can use. One morning I saw her. "Phasor 3.5 kw marine diesel gen set" It had been completely rebuilt. Asking price was 1200, firm. Well, lets say I nearly dropped out of my chair. A unit I was about to pay $4500 for, had just fell on my lap. The catch was I had to drive half way to New Orleans to get it. No problem. For $3300 I would drive half way to Fiji.

More to come!

Our new, fun, multi-color tender

Well, after a long long time of working on it, I can now say it runs nicely.
However let me start with this:

FREE CRUISING GEAR!!!!!

I was given an engine that does not run, with a good condition lower unit. This was issue number one with my outboard.

When I was sold this outboard I was given the nautical equivalent of the "old lady driving to church" story about this engine. That it had been on a sailboat, and shop maintained. I can slice up some fine German or beef baloney, but I cannot fill an order that big. First, they had not lubed the lower unit in who knows how long. When you turn the shaft by hand, its actually hard to turn. That explains why the engine was hard to start, didn't want to run, randomly shut off, would pop out of gear, ECT.

This may also be why I was never able to plane.

Once I changed it out for the free one, MAGIC!!!!! This thing runs pretty good now.
It is UGLY, but functional, just like the rest of the dinghy.

I tried it out, taking it the entire way out to the municipal mooring field. Where I had a job diving on the Chris Lea.

Success! Glad to have a great working tender!

Amazing oven

Well today we ran out of propane for the stove. Normally this in itself wouldn't be worth a blog post. Except for one detail: we've been using the same tank for 5 months! The last fill was when we left New York.

The oven we had before we moved onto our yacht ran on propane too. Propane also fueled our heat so the tanks never really lasted long. A month in the summer is how long we could count on it to last and a week or so in the winter. We didn't cook as much with that stove as we do with now so we figured this one would last about a month at the most.

After the first month we rethought that. The second month went by and we still didn't need to fill it. The third, fourth, and fifth month we didn't need to either. We were starting to wonder if it would ever run out. Apparently we have a very efficient stove. Other then not having enough room in/on it sometimes it's a great little stove. It's gimbled too so that came in handy when we were sailing.

Needless to say we still had complaints about it. Actually it wasn't until a few weeks ago that we figured out how to use the oven part correctly. It used to be that after we were done with the oven to turn it off we would have to turn the gas off. It turns out that the knob was stripped and wasn't turning like it was supposed to. Duh! Now the oven works perfectly. We can't fix the "too small" part of it though. All in all, still a great stove.

Joshua went out to change the propane tank. I had him get a new one before we left Charleston and it's been latched to the deck ever since. All shiny and new with readable stickers. The one he pulled out of the propane locker has seen better days. In fact, it looks like it's been through war! I commend it for holding up.

Bottoms clean, engines junk.

   Well after we earned our diving certification things have slowed down a bit. To be honest I, Joshua, have been a bit lazy. I say a bit because I have cleaned the bottoms of 3 boats now. Cleaning the bottoms of boats is about the hardest job imaginable, and by far the hardest job I have done.

Close your eyes and imagine not being able to see anything but dark brown. While you see this dark brown, you are swimming into a current, pushing yourself away from the bottom of a boat with your hand as you swim towards it. Inside your wetsuit are small shrimp, 1000's of them. All crawling, biting, squirming. In your hair, nasty little bugs. Yeah, its gross, hard work. When you have spent 2 hours, kicking like crazy you have a last effort to return to a boat. Only you weigh 400# now, with all of your gear. I enjoy punishing myself.

 

  

   Here I am cleaning our boat bottom. So far I have done 3 types of bottoms. The first one was ours. Its a fin keel. It has a very long waterline, but only a 12' keel in the center jutting down into the blackness. Our bottom paint is somehow still good after 5 years in the cold New york waters. We only had a layer of silt. It has not been cleaned in a year, so I have no idea how it only has silt on it.
   The second was a 26' sailboat with a wing keel. Not only did it have two keels, but it had bad bottom paint. I ended up scraping all of it with the 6" knife. In the end he lost a lot of paint because those hard shelled critters don't let go. I also think the paint was poorly applied, It seemed to not adhere to the bottom of the boat. After this I reserve the right to adjust the price according to how bad the bottom is. This was badly neglected.
   The third boat was a full keel 43' spindrift. The bottom was covered in small shrimp, like I told you earlier.
 Its not that it was bad growth, It was just living growth. No fun. I came out covered. The fun part was chasing Dana while covered in bugs.



   Engine. I found a great deal from a marine repair shop

Or so I thought. I got a 1970-80 johnson 9.9HP, for $375. It came with a 30 day warranty . So I was having an issue with it, so I took it back to the dealer. It is the boat repair place at riverside marina, St Augustine. This guy is unbelievable. He said it was the water pump, and the water pump is not part of the warranty. wait, WHAT? In some stretch of the imagination he thought I sucked up a plastic bag, or mud and it would not be covered. I said, you gave me 30 days, he says "It does not apply to this"

Oh, so that 30 days has some exclusions that are not mentioned until I have an issue? AVOID!!!!
I have spare time, and will take him to small claims. He has not heard the last from me.
   So after this discussion, with him becoming irate, he goes and now you owe me two days storage on the dinghy...... Really, he asked me to bring it in and leave it.... I said, oh yeah how much is that... he said take your (expletive) and get out. Class act. This guy is a serious looser, and is not knowledgeable in, well, anything except how to be a jerk. He speaks fluent jerk. I ordered the parts from west marine, hopefully this fixes the issue of it skipping out of gear when hot as well. Guess I am learning outboard repair...


Before you leave, we are now an Amazon partner. As part of the program we can offer you a 30 day free Amazon Prime membership. If you do not like it or want to keep it, you may cancel anytime! Check it out.

30 Day FREE amazon prime membership!!! Sign up now for this special trial. Cancel anytime.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

We are so excited because we just got scuba certified! I (Dana) did it mainly for the enjoyment factor but we made sure to get Joshua certified for many reasons. One being: he needs to learn to be more comfortable in the water. We live on it! He doesn't enjoy swimming or getting wet. I am the complete opposite. Another reason was so that we could have the ability to clean the bottom of our boat. While you may be able to get some of it when you hold your breath you won't be able to get it all. Plus, what people charge for a cleaning is a lot. Within a few months our investment will pay for itself. Plus, Josh will be able to make a business cleaning bottoms, installing zincs, and doing emergency underwater repairs.

Our research also told us that in order to be able to get a tank filled you need a certification. So there we were, with many reasons to do it. Our next decision was where to get certified. You can Google search all you want but ultimately it comes down to word of mouth. We asked our friends at St. Augustine Cruisers Net to suggest somewhere and the answer was unanimously iDive.

His prices turned out to be one of the most reasonable when we did our research too. When Joshua called the owner, Ken, he was pleased with how he responded to his questions. They offer a mini class called "Try SCUBA". So we did! We don't have any pictures from that class but we immediately went after the class to sign up for certification.

 

See how happy and excited Josh was for the class? He made sure we were early. I was excited too but I was concentrating more on getting us there. ;-) 

Ken (left) and Josh demonstrating good buoyancy control

Dana!

 Here we were demonstrating skills. Josh did well on his buoyancy control here in the pool. I struggled a bit.

The second dive wasn't in a heated pool :-( but in a spring. DeLeon Springs actually. Here it was quite smaller then what I thought it would be. We got to practice our "giant stride" getting in though. It was fun! I struggled a bit this day but it turns out I didn't have enough weight. Once the instructor gave me more I was fine.

30 Day FREE amazon prime membership!!! Sign up now for this special trial. Cancel anytime.

We didn't get many pictures this day because the visibility wasn't great. What is weird is that some of the pictures came out with a blue tint while most of them were green (see above-ick).

Here is another diver harassing a turtle. It didn't much like the attention! Later she went on to try and pick it up but the turtle escaped her grasp.

The last day, our check out dive, was at Devil's Den. It was supposed to be at another location but they had what is called "brown out conditions". I think you all can guess what that meant. So our instructor had us go here. Unfortunately it cost us more money to dive here then the other spot but Ken promised us we would love it. Let's hope so.

Here's the view looking down. It is impressive to look at, very pretty. It's quite a ways down so I had a little bit of trouble getting down the stairs (fear of heights). Ken, ever the patient guy, talked to me the whole way as he had been the first down. I was fine once down. The water was a bit chilly but not bad.

These last two photos aren't as great. The light was poor and GoPros don't fare as well in low lighting. This one above is a still taken from the bottom of the stairs.

Here's the other side. Hi guys! This is Ken on the right and another instructor (I'm sorry, I forgot his name!) on the left. The other instructor ended up being my dive buddy at the end because Josh got too low on air and I hadn't been able to explore the whole way around. I wanted my moneys worth! Haha...again, we were shocked at the price but I enjoyed it.

When we came up we were officially certified, we passed!! So exciting! Ken cooked for us and we hung out until the woman threatened to lock us in ;-)

Certified!!!

Waiting for food

Grill master Ken

I'm going to post a video on Facebook so make sure to hop over to this link and check it out. While you're there please give us a "Like"! In case you want to know Ken is on FB too at this link> iDive.

Thanks for the great dives Ken, hopefully we can do more with you!

New but old-Dana's view

I have a few things to say about our old dinghy. More then a few actually but in addition to being old, small, and a bit of an eye sore it was reliable. It got us out of a jam when we were in NYC and Joshua had many fun adventures with it but it wasn't really meant to be a dinghy like we were using it for. In fact, it was actually a child's sailing dinghy. I never stepped foot into it. It was too tippy and wasn't meant to hold much weight. It also leaked a little. As I said...many things to say about it.

We have been looking for a new one ever since it was obvious we would need a bigger one. When you are on anchor not only will a dinghy get you to the shore from the boat while holding you but also any laundry, groceries, and water. We knew we wanted it to still fit on the foredeck when we made any passages and it also needed to be durable. Inflatables are nice but made of plastic and tend to deteriorate quickly.

So we needed strength, longevity, a good size, and most of all-a decent price. You would not believe how hard it is to find each one of those things without having to sacrifice another. But we did it! It kind of just happened. Joshua was skimming the local Craigslist and came across an ad for the dinghy that was docked on other side of our slip. Imagine that, it was right under our noses.

Joshua said he looked at the ad before but for whatever reason skipped it. He showed me and I told him to just shoot the guy a quick email. The guy mentioned he was actually going to be stopping by the marina that day-perfect!


I wasn't present for the whole conversation but Joshua has a way of dickering with people so I knew he didn't need my help. By the time I had gotten out there he worked it out so that not only were we going to get it for less then listing price but he was also going to take our old dinghy. This was a big weight off of our shoulders as we weren't sure how to get rid of it. Who would want such an old boat?

Apparently there is always a person who has a need for old boats as the day after our deal some people were there picking it up. They said they were very happy because they had been looking for one. When asked what they were going to do with it they said it will be their new couch. Ok, to each their own! It was finally off the foredeck from when we lashed it down to go offshore and would actually have a purpose again.
30 Day FREE amazon prime membership!!! Sign up now for this special trial. Cancel anytime.

I'm sure that Joshua will have an interesting story to tell regarding my issue with small boats but I finally conquered my fear and got in. I'm proud of myself!

Out with the old....

...In with the new(ish). 

I want to thank everyone for reading and following our adventures. We have many more in store so stay tuned! Also, we have a Facebook page now so please give us a "like" and share with your friends!
 Our Facebook Page