Cruise Date June 3rd...

Cruise Date June 3 4:35 PM Guanaja Bay Islands Honduras
As we wind down this years cruise I thought we might look back and review this years casualty report on what breakdowns we had and how we might have prevented them. I will try to do these in order. We are about 2 ½ weeks from crossing the Bar on the Rio and checking into Mario’s Marina for hurricane season. We have been covering a lot of water over the last 7 months, visited a lot of beautiful places…a few ugly ones too. We have met and made many new friends along the way. We look forward to meeting up with them again at some other anchorage.
The Lady H will be 6 yrs old in September. Over the last 6 yrs she has sailed and motored almost 30,000 miles. Some items are at the end of their useful life are in need of replacement. Others are junk and need to be pitched over the side.
Starting last year our Icom SSB has had some problems. It just shut down when I transmitted. We send the power supply back…$90 later they could not find a problem. Joyce was flying home to Seattle before Christmas, so her luggage included a complete 802 SSB and power supply. They had this for 3 weeks testing 24/7 and could not find a fault. The unit was air freighted to us in the USVI, by Icom at no charge. This is a company with real customer service and we as cruisers should support them by buying their products. Sorry Raymarine …cannot say that about your products.. they are the junk that need to go over the side.
On our passage south we had the transmission cooler fail mixing the transmission fluid with seawater. Would have been nice if the cooler had a zinc which might have prevented the electrolysis that caused the failure. Luckily with Denny’s help we were able to fix this before there was damage to the transmission. Stinky our 8 hp Mercury outboard had to see the outboard doctor…$350 ouch…maybe if Stinky had not had 2 saltwater baths in the last year, that could have been prevented. A few years back I replaced my fresh water pump with a new design pump. I have replaced 4 of these under warranty in the last 2 yrs. Kind of hard to go out and spend 300 bucks on a new one when they keep sending me new ones for free…but that is the solution. We had a bowthruster failure at a critical time…luckily no damage to the boat, just my pride. Seems a seal had failed allowing saltwater into the gearbox. Will be checking more carefully when we haul the boat each year.
Batteries have been a subject of many a blog on this boat. Back in January, we replaced all 12 of the house batteries for the 5th time in 6 years. 2 problems here, the quality of the battery and how they are charged. The Lady H came with 13 group 27 deep cycle marine batteries. These failed 11 months later to be replaced under warranty. Replaced again 18 months later at my cost, followed every 10 or 11 months under warranty. An Amel, an electric boat has 640 AH at 24 volts….lots of battery power. But they have no way to equalize the batteries as they age. Last year I installed a new inverter/charger that has an equalization cycle. By spending a night in a marina, plugged in we can recover almost 1/3-1/2 of the capacity by equalizing. Amel, listen up…you need to provide a method to equalize the batteries on your boats.
Soon after we left Amel in Gaudelupe, the electric outhaul motor quit. I was able to remove and clean, but the motor needs new brushes…as does the main and jenny furling motors. This is a wear item…it’s time .. a job while up the Rio.
The water maker has been working making great water since we replaced the membranes back in Annapolis. The system has 785 hours and has made almost 28,000 gallons of water. There are 2 pumps, a high pressure which had service 3-4 yrs ago and a low pressure feed pump that pumps seawater through the pre-filters. Well this is a 220 volt 50 hz motor…almost impossible to find down here in the islands unless you want to pay 3x the price from Amel. Since we are not using the A/C, I plumbed and wired the A/C pump to be the feeder pump. Matt my Marine son is flying down this weekend, loaded down with 3 pumps and lots of other goodies. I will install a new feeder pump and replace the existing A/C pump using the old as a spare. He also has one of the warranted water pumps as another spare. We do expect hard usage on the A/C so I thought we would start with a new pump.
On our sail to Bonaire, the ballooner “hook “ as it is called broke, allowing the sail to come down the forestay into the water while sailing at 7-8 knots. These are plastic, I ordered 2 new so I would have a spare. Amel informed me they only had 1 at $90, but could supply us one of the new style of some other material for 325 Euros. I ordered the plastic and will get one machined of aluminum for ½ that.
Raymarine is a sore subject on the Lady. I have replaced almost every component, some 2 and 3 times. Junk…on my %^%#@# list. The VHF radio has what is called a command mic. You control the entire radio form the mic. 4 yrs ago had to replace this mic because the LED could not be read. The hand set is in the companionway and is pulled out for use in the cockpit. Well the curly cord is cracking causing the radio to shut down. I inquired about a replacement cable….. oh no you have to buy the handset for $275. Screw them…will buy a new Icom.
We were getting ready to leave Guanaja on Tuesday, I had started the generator to charge the batteries and make some water. 5 minutes into the charge and the engine quits, the indicator light indicating the need for service. I thought back to when I had last replaced the water pump impeller, yep…7 months ago. The damn things break apart every 6-8 months. I change the engine yearly and have never had to change one because of failure. The genset fails before the yearly replacement. I pulled off the pump…getting pretty good at it. I replace the impeller with our last spare and reinstalled the pump. I started the engine and Joyce indicated no water flow. Damn, now time to remove the heat exchanger and fish out the broken impeller blades. Back together and try again…no water flow. Double damn. Removed the pump again…yep blades gone. I use my impeller removal tool, no go..seems the key way on the shaft has spun inside the impeller. Looking more like replacing the pump than just an impeller. Where in the hell am I going to get that down here before Matt arrives. Now here is the situation, we have no replacement impeller or pump, my son arrives Saturday, we have less then 1/3 tank of water, laundry needs to be done and the batteries need a good charge. Well we can charge the batteries with the main engine, but the water and laundry were a problem. Yes we could go in and get water and do the laundry ashore….there had to be a better way. I sat below in the engine room. I had hoses going everywhere, most not to the designated pump. I spied our 24 volt anchor wash pump. Since we were not using the windlass, why not plumb it into the heat exchanger of the genset. I move some hoses around and fired up the genset. 5 min later and the unit shut down, overheated. Damn, went below to find the pumps breaker had tripped. Double damn again. Then I remembered that all the salt water pumps had a screwdriver slot at the back of the pump. This allows you to rotate the pump manually to break up any marine growth. A few turns and off it went. We made 400 liters of water, charged the batteries and did a load of laundry.
Last and probably the most important and expensive is the windlass. We live on the hook. Total marina time in the last 7 months 5-6 days…remember equalization. The rest of the time we are at anchor. I’m an anchor guy…best anchor, best chain…and you need a way to get all that back on the boat. Lofrans Tigress is a great windlass. Have had no problems except for the up/down switches Amel installed. These switches fail after about 12-16 months. Have had 1 instance where the switch shorted letting all 225 feet of chain out…remember always have the bitter end secured (end of the anchor rode)
Well in the Aves, we returned to the boat, I commented to Joyce that the chain snubber was off. Upon inspection the windlass had decided to wind up the chain only to be stopped when the snubber jammed the windlass. No snubber and the windlass would have hauled up the anchor and the boat floating away. All seemed to work then. In Bonaire one cannot anchor so the next time we used the windlass was in Curacao. Not happy with the first set...the 2st set was in the channel so I picked up and the windlass jammed and tripped the breaker with the anchor hanging just above the surface. Joyce circled while I launched the 2nd anchor on 50 ft of chain and 250 of rode. Long story short, no 24 v motors in the Caribbean, no 24 v windlass’s in the Caribbean. We have devised a system to save Joyce’s back to retrieve the anchor till we get up the Rio.
So here we are in Rotan, A/C pump feeding the watermaker, the anchor wash pump cooling the heat exchanger of the genset, our anchor puller upper using the powered winch is retriving the anchor, the mainsail has a seam rip,the bottom need a good cleaning and new paint. The list of to do's is into the 3rd page.The whole boat needs a bath as it has not rained for 3 weeks. And the 7 day passage from Curasao has left us exhausted and in need of a few weeks of downtime. I'm finishing up this blog a few days later and Matt arrives tomorrow (June 6th) around noon, so no rest till next weekend.