Winter Projects

Winter, 2020-2021

We spent the winter at our home marina in Jacksonville, FL where we are legal residents.  We usually spend the winters fixing and upgrading the boat, and this year was no exception.  We had more maintenance than usual this year, replacing a muffler, stabilizer hydraulic pump and repairing wood rot in the flybridge console, but we also bought a new dinghy and freezer this year.  The new dinghy is still an ongoing project.

The first big project was the stabilizer pump.  This pump provides power to the stabilizer fins that keep the boat level while cruising, and the pump is attached to a Power Take Off on the port engine’s transmission.  The pump oil seal had failed, and stabilizer oil was leaking into the transmission.  The pump is shown below. 

Getting the old pump off was pretty easy, but the real hard part was draining the oil from the stabilizer system.  The reservoir was located where getting a drip pan under it was nearly impossible, so I lost about 2 gallons of oil into the bilge.  It is illegal to put oil in the water (usually resulting in huge fines), so I was able to disable the bilge pumps quickly before it was pumped overboard.  An awful mess that had to be cleaned up.

The replacement pump had to be special ordered to fit, and then it would not match up to the mounting holes.  I finally took the pump to a small local machine shop and had them modify the mounting flange.  Now it fits, and is back in service.

We also had a muffler that was starting to fail.  The mufflers on boats like this are really important items as the seawater that cools the engine (through a heat exchanger) gets sprayed into the exhaust to cool it.  The engine exhaust pressure then forces the water out the tailpipe along with the engine exhaust gasses.  While the muffler does quiet the engine some its real purpose is to manage that exhausting seawater. 

The new muffler is shown below.  The old tailpipe was still intact, but it was too stiff to fit onto the new muffler.  So I cut the old pipe off, bought a stainless steel pipe as a mating connector to the old pipe (which also had to be machined to size), and then connected everything with the new blue hose shown in the photo.  This took several weeks of work to figure out a way to connect things.  Thankfully it is done now, and I’m a lot smarter on marine exhaust systems.

As we were preparing to leave the marina I decided to relocate a component under the flybridge console.  In doing so I discovered rainwater had been entering the console structure and an embedded sheet of marine plywood had rotted away to almost nothing.  This is something that had to be fixed.  I removed all the steering and engine control components, and all of the navigation electronics on the flybridge, and then was lucky enough to find a local small business that repaired the console structure.  A small business that is just getting started, and the owner did a great job repairing the console.  After I put everything back in place, and got it all working again, we were able to start the season’s cruising. 

We had two upgrades this year, a new dinghy and a freezer.  Our old inflatable dinghy would not hold air any longer, and it was just time for a new one.  We store the dinghy on the upper deck and launch and recover it with a crane that is shown in the photo below.  There are many places where we can’t get our big boat close to shore, so the dinghy is important as a short-range taxi for us.  We also added a 3 cubic foot freezer on our aft deck that connects to the battery system on the boat. 

Finally we finished everything, a month later than we expected.  But we’re back underway again.