Monthly Archives: September 2017

A Fresh Rinse

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Sometimes when we raise anchor, it comes up coated in thick, black, foul smelling mud. I don’t want the stinky muck to end up in the chain locker, but the only practical way to wash the anchor and chain has been to keep dropping a five gallon bucket over the side with a rope to dip up seawater for rinsing, repeating a dozen or more times until the anchor is back onboard. At eight pounds per gallon, a full five gallon bucket weighs 40 pounds, and my poor back is usually begging for mercy after the first half dozen drops.

We love it when Rhonda can hook a big Mahi or other pelagic fish while we’re offshore. But by the time we finally get the darn thing onboard, subdued and filleted out, the cockpit looks like the shower scene from Psycho. There’s blood spattered from the swim platform to the companionway, and rivers of red run through the cockpit. We can get to some of the mess with our existing cockpit handheld shower, but cleaning the rest requires going back to the bucket brigade.

I’ve known that someday we’d want to install a washdown system so that we could just break out a hose and spray away the messes. Since we usually have plenty of fresh water onboard, I wanted to start out with a freshwater washdown, because it was the easiest to install. All we needed to do was tap into the boat’s existing water system. A saltwater system would have required a new hole in the hull for a dedicated thru-hull fitting (which would have required hauling the boat), and installation of a washdown pump and associated electrical circuit.

Something that made this job a pretty easy one to tackle is the fact that our Hunter (and probably most modern production boats) are plumbed with PEX piping, which is a semi-rigid plastic. The plumbing is put together with Qest fittings, which are just about the easiest, most fool proof plumbing connectors you can imagine. You just cut the plastic pipe and slide on the Qest connector nut, metal collar and compression acorn, and you’re ready to connect up to a new fitting. No special tools or skills required.

qest

Developed for use in the mobile home and RV market, Qest fittings aren’t something you can usually find in your local Lowe’s or Home Depot. But we can find whatever we need at our local RV dealer, with the added benefit that they’re sold at cheap RV store prices, rather than at a marine store markup. They’re also available from several online sources, such as PlumbingSupply.com.

The first step was to empty out the starboard lazarette in order to gain access to the plumbing for the cockpit shower, disconnect the cold water line from the shower, and cut the line in order to insert a T connector.

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Next I broke out the drill and hole saw, because every good boat job involves making a hole in the boat. I placed the hole where there was enough depth to connect the plumbing, carefully avoiding interfering with the engine stop cable.

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Next I installed a Jabsco washdown quick connect fitting in the newly drilled hole, bedding it with some butyl rubber for a watertight seal. I liked this fitting because it sits flush so that when you disconnect the washdown hose, there isn’t an ugly ankle-knocking hose bib sticking out.

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The last step was to use a Qest elbow and a short length of 1/2″ hose with the appropriate connectors to tie the washdown fitting to the newly installed T.

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The washdown fitting comes with a quick connect that you attach to a standard hose. You then just insert the hose into the washdown fitting and give it a little twist to lock it in place when you want to do a rinse.

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We purchased a 50 foot coiling hose so that I can easily stretch it up to the bow to deal with a muddy anchor.

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But the hose coils up compactly enough to easily fit in the lazarette when not being used.

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We could probably use a washdown connection at both ends of the boat, but for now I thought we’d just put one back aft since it was the easiest place to access the existing freshwater system. Maybe when the day eventually comes when we’ll have to haul the boat again, we might consider installing a new thru-hull somewhere up forward so that we can add a saltwater washdown system also.

In Praise of Production Cruisers

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This is a post for those of you that geek out on the technical side of boating and marine design. I was having a conversation recently with a fellow boater who told me that he was shopping for a cruising sailboat, but was advised to ignore production boats (e.g.  models by Beneteau, Catalina, Hunter, Jeanneau) as they weren’t suitable boats for cruising. Next to the relative merits of different anchor types, few topics will generate a more heated discussion among a group of sailors than the suitability of modern production boats for cruising. On one side you have the Old Salts, who think only limited production, heavier displacement, craft-built boats like a Hinkley, Westsail or Bristol can safely transport you to faraway islands. On the other side, you’ll find a large number of sailors who own and actively cruise their late model production boats and who know from experience that no matter where you go in the world, you’ll find the harbor full of boats that Old Salts will swear were never capable of making the trip. It’s clear which side we fall in with. We’ve traveled close to 5,000 nautical miles so far on our 1997 Hunter 376, and think she’s a terrific boat for island hopping.  There’s a list of features that we think make her a great cruiser, but the one I’d like to talk about today is how the use of an interior fiberglass floor pan stiffens and reinforces the hull.

At one time, builders hand-fitted wooden frames into their hulls, and then fiberglassed them in place. Unfortunately wood rots, particularly if water finds a way inside the fiberglass. And all the labor needed to do this fitting and layup costs a lot. So as fiberglass technology progressed through the 1970’s and 80’s, builders began devising ways to cut production costs by molding a solid fiberglass floor grid consisting of a series of box beams, and then gluing this into the hull interior. The Old Salts will say that this makes access to the interior of the hull impossible in the event that you get holed (you hit something at sea that punches a hole in the bottom of your boat). But the modern naval architect will point out that as an engineered, wood free structure, this grid is incredibly strong, light and will never rot. Personally, while both may have a point, I’ll take light, strong, cheap and durable, which benefits us every single day, over the extremely unlikely possibility of being holed while underway, requiring an emergency repair at sea.

We recently pulled up a portion of our cabin sole in order to refinish it, in the process exposing some of our boat’s interior floor pan.

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As I looked at the box beam grid, I realized that I had seen this method of reinforcing used before. Here’s a shot of a Metro subway station in Washington, DC, which Rhonda and I have ridden many times in years past:

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The box beam construction they used when building this tunnel makes for a light yet strong structure that resists the weight of the city above. And if you took the top of that subway tunnel and flipped it over, you’d have something pretty similar to how a modern production boat hull is designed.

To give you an idea of how long engineers have known that a box beam grid makes for a strong, light structure, here’s a picture of the Roman Pantheon, constructed almost 2,000 years ago and still standing despite being built in a seismically active area.

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This is pure engineering excellence. So as far as I’m concerned, if an Old Salt tells you that production boats aren’t strong enough to take cruising, ask them how they can doubt a technology that’s been in use and performing well for over two millennia.

Boat Hacks – Outboard Edition

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Here’s another item in our Boat Hacks series, which are posts about little things that solve little problems. Today we’re looking at an easy fix to a recurring problem that has dogged us for quite some time, the dreaded issue of outboard motor clamp lock.

There are a lot of things to dislike about outboard motors. My feelings toward them are about the same as my feelings towards horses – they’re evil, spiteful things that continually look for ways to openly defy and frustrate you, and you count your blessings if they uneventfully deliver you to your destination. One major source of problems comes from the use of materials that aren’t fully compatible with a marine environment, or at least a saltwater marine environment. For instance, the screw clamps that you tighten to lock the outboard in place are made of a metal that doesn’t really get along well with the engine mount casting. Consequently, if left alone for too long, corrosion causes them to seize up. When they do, the short toggle handles you have to use to loosen/tighten the screw clamps are too short to apply sufficient force to break them free.

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I’ve kept a short length of stainless rail in the stern locker to slip over the toggles to use as a cheater bar to get extra leverage, but if you get overzealous, then you shear off the toggle pins and the handles fall off. We keep a small supply of these pins onboard as replacements since they seem to break pretty frequently. The thing about these shear pins though is that you peen them in place with a hammer, and they’re not designed to be removed.

Recently our screw clamps froze up so firmly that I actually fractured the toggle handles themselves trying to get the clamps to turn. Life actually got a bit easier as a result, because with the toggles now gone I could just put a crescent wrench on the end of the screws to turn them. But I didn’t like the idea of having to always remember to grab a wrench when I wanted to put the outboard on the dinghy. Then I had my “duh” moment.

Instead of replacing the toggle pins with another set that are peened in place, why not just use a couple of stainless cotter pins? That way I could use the toggle handles to tighten up the outboard, but if the clamps seize up, I could just pop the cotter pins out and remove the toggle handles so that I could put a wrench on the head of the clamp screws.

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Since we’re a sailboat, we keep a handy box of various sizes of stainless pins and rings onboard. I found two that fit, popped them in, and they worked great.

The true solution to this problem is following a proper preventative maintenance schedule, and I’ll have a post soon about PMS (the non-hormonal type). But it’s good to know that if this issue ever gets away from us again and the screw clamps seize up, I can just pull out these cotter pins to bring more power to the problem in the form of leverage from a big wrench.

Making Space

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If you’ve spent any time around boats, you know how valuable storage space is. There’s never enough room for all the “stuff” you want to bring onboard, and being a cruiser and liveaboard means life is a constant exercise in possessional triage, where every item has to have enough value and utility to make the cut and find a home on board, with the rest ending up stored ashore or disposed of. Things are even a bit worse when you own a Hunter, like we do. Hunter put a great deal of effort into packing the biggest living spaces possible into the hull, which makes the boat live like one that’s significantly larger. But it comes at the expense of little things like storage lockers. You get a lot of room to lounge on a Hunter, but not a lot of places to store stuff. So when we find a way to turn an unused area into a locker, we jump on it.

While waiting around to see what Hurricane Irma was going to do, we decided to start pulling out our cabin sole (interior floor) to apply some coats of polyurethane. When we unscrewed the chart table seat from the deck and removed the sole panel, we found this vacant, completely empty, totally unused void. There’s probably two whole cubic feet of potential storage there! Enough to allow for a significant expansion of our wine collection, an additional case of beer, or possibly even something practical, like groceries and spare parts.

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We know a really good, reasonably priced marine carpenter here in Pensacola, so I immediately gave him a call to ask him how busy he was at the moment. As things worked out, his truck was at the repair shop and he was just puttering around his shop working on this and that. Could he do a quick plunge-cut on a sole board to put in an access panel, I asked him? Sure, drop it on by, he said. So we dropped the panel off, and four hours later we had a newly cut and trimmed out access panel, opening up this formerly sealed void that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since April of 1997 when Eagle Too was built.

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Cutting the hole took a lot of the strength out of the panel, so before reinstalling it we attached a cleat to the head bulkhead to support the edge of the sole panel. I’m actually surprised the factory hadn’t put a support cleat here since that was such a large, unsupported span, and it explains why that particular floor board always creaked when walked on.

cleat

Do you own one of the hundreds of Hunter 376’s (or possibly a 380 or maybe even a 386, which are later versions of the same boat)? Then you might want to look into opening up this enclosed void. Because it’s an easy way to create a couple of cubic feet of that most valuable of spaces, a place to store your stuff.

Storm Fatigue

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One hundred and seventeen years ago this week, the National Weather Service office in Galveston, Texas received spotty reports via telegraph of possible storm conditions in Cuba. Anecdotal information from ships arriving at the port indicated that something serious was possibly brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. On the morning of September 8th, 1900, the manager of the weather service office noted a falling barometer and a steadily increasing wind. By midnight, between 6,000 and 12,000 residents of Galveston were dead, killed by the wind and surge effects of a direct hit by a major hurricane that no one saw coming. To this day it’s unknown how many ultimately died, as the bodies of the drowned were burned in huge funeral pyres on the beach to prevent the spread of disease from the rotting corpses. There is no count of how many simply washed out to sea, never to be seen again.

Yesterday, Hurricane Irma roared ashore in the Florida Keys as a strong category four storm. Although similar in size and strength to that estimated for the Great Storm of 1900, only a handful of deaths have been attributed to it. The difference is technology. In 1900, there were no weather satellites or remotely monitored ocean buoys. No Weather Channel to provide updates, and no radio to spread the word of approaching danger. Ships returning from sea were the only reliable sources of offshore weather information, which in many cases was days or weeks old by the time they made port.

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On that fateful Saturday morning 117 years ago, most citizens of Galveston probably awoke and went about their business, completely unaware that by midnight, they’d be struggling for their lives, a battle that thousands would lose. Today we can see a storm before it’s even born, rolling off the coast of Africa as a tropical wave. We can follow it as it forms and develops, predict its path, and observe its impact on those whose lives it crosses. But there is a small downside to this. Thanks to our technology, we now have a week or more to fret, worry, and obsess about what may come. Days of watching stores sell out of water and gas, resupply, and then sell out again. Days to watch shelters open and highways clog as evacuees jam the roadways, fleeing the predicted point of impact. Days to view looping videos endlessly repeating reports of destruction from places already hit, as sandbags are filled and emergency measures implemented in the places that are next in line.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy beyond measure that through our technology, we can avoid a disaster like the Great Storm of 1900. But it does take its toll in sleepless nights and high anxiety, waiting and watching, watching and waiting. I’ll be immensely happy when this whole thing is finally over, and everyone we know in the affected areas has checked in as safe.

We’ve been extremely fortunate this time. Hurricane Irma stayed far enough to our east that we only felt some gale force gusts and a few light sprinkles. Since we’re tucked into a slip that sits directly below a three story building, effectively protecting us from the north winds the storm is generating here, we just removed all loose gear topside. We didn’t have to implement our hurricane plan, which would have had us moving Eagle Too to the well protected Bayou Grande Marina at Naval Air Station Pensacola and then evacuating inland. We still had our mooring lines doubled up from our trip to Charleston SC a few weeks ago to see the solar eclipse, and because our mooring cleats have a fair lead and don’t run through chocks (since chocks are probably the worst idea ever implemented on a boat, guaranteeing maximum line chaff during a blow), we didn’t have to add chaff gear. With maximum gusts predicted to be less than 35 knots (about 40 mph), or about what a passing thunderstorm produces, I saw no need to strip the sails, and we didn’t have to collapse our solar panel-covered bimini , as I engineered it to take 50 knot winds (although we did remove our Sunbrella sunshade).

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Yes, after a week of following the weather reports, we’re suffering from a severe case of storm fatigue. But we’re very conscious of the fact that friends of ours, people we’ve met in our travels down in the Islands and who keep their boats in places like the Keys, Marco Island, Vero Beach, Bradenton and St Petersburg, would probably trade places with us in an instant. We hope that they and their boats are all well, and that this will be the last time we need deal with such a situation this hurricane season.

Here’s a terrific book I’d recommend about the Great Storm of 1900 if you’d like to learn more about the tragedy in Galveston that occured 117 years ago this week:

Issac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, And The Greatest Hurricane In History