A New Year Begins, New Destinations Await

You know you're getting older when your favorite local radio station is called The Real Oldies. Whatever happened to K-Rock, Planet Rock, or KIISS and the like?  They all drifted into pop sameness, or repetitive rapping, is what happened..... and I stopped listening.

Here in Florida we had a great Christmas, listening to The Real Oldies on the rental car radio, pulling together the supplies and parts we needed and then celebrating with friends at Hobe Sound, north of Palm Beach.

George & Nancy Marvin, OCC Port Officers for the region, kindly invited us to share Christmas Eve and Christmas Day Luncheon with them - a fine group of cruisers were there, so spirits were high and endless dreams and lies circulated the table.

George & Nancy also kindly acted as a delivery point for our many parcels in the weeks before and after Christmas. Once those goodies were in hand we settled down to a sequence of repairs and service jobs onboard Crystal Blues.

The toughest project was replacing the heater hoses that snake their way through the boat from the engine to the hot water service. The old hose had been installed 12 years ago and was starting to crack - we'd found and repaired two leaks in the past 6 months.

So out it came, which took a day, and then the new silicone rubber hose went in, which took a couple of days - there is about 70 feet of hose in the circuit.  For good measure we flushed and cleaned the cooling circuit in the engine, and replaced the coolant in the system.

Both the Northern Lights genset and the Cummins main engine were due for injector servicing, so we gave both engines a treat and installed new (actually re-built) injectors. Both machines are running silky smooth now, aided by the recent valve lash adjustment - you really can tell the difference.

The Cummins was also rewarded with a new Walker AirSep Filter system, the original item having passed it's use-by date - 12 years was a good run. All in all the boat did real well in the Christmas gift department.

As to those radio stations, we also spent a day installing a new FM radio antenna connection - then scrolled right past the local spanish and rock / pop channels to settle on Legends Radio, a local jazz oriented station. Bliss.

Hopefully we'll be well ahead on the service and maintenance items when we leave here, and can spend time relaxing in the Bahamas soon. The cold weather that is impacting us should pass in a couple of days, and we're hoping for a clear weather window early next week for passage to the Bahamas.

New Walker AirSep Filter System Installed

 

Northern Lights - Exhaust Injection Elbow Blues

Looks Good On The Outside, But Completely Rusted Out On The Inside

Our first maintenance job in Trinidad was to investigate why our Northern Lights generator was not coping with larger loads.

Valve or injector problems was the local agent's opinion (and mine), however the freelance mechanic they referred us to knew better. After asking some well focused questions he said he would pull the exhaust injection elbow off first.

I'm glad he did - it was found to be almost totally blocked by corrosion and accumulated soot.  The poor little diesel had been working against enormous back pressure for some time - no wonder it was feeling over loaded.

Now I was warned about this - my friend Dana on the sailing yacht Villa G had a similar experience. It seems that these generators are shipped from the factory with a - wait for it - cast iron injection elbow.  These just have to rust out very quickly and I think we were lucky to get over 1700 hours of service.

We did have a spare injection elbow on board, this one made from shiny cast 316L stainless steel - I'm told it will last three times as long as the cast iron version.  They just cost a little more, which is why they are considered "optional" - not standard equipment. With the new elbow fitted the machined returned to full power immediately, and we breathed a sigh of relief. This was the first part failure on our Northern Lights generator since new, we're still very impressed with the reliability.

Boat Shopping In Grenada

Loading The Important Things In Grenada - Italian Wine By The Box Load

Two weeks ago we sailed overnight from Tobago to Grenada, an overnight down-wind romp for 80 nautical miles that had us approaching the south coast of Grenada just after dawn. By 07:30am we were anchored in Prickly Bay and by 10:00am we had completed the friendly Immigration and Customs formalities - which then let us get down to the nitty gritty of this voyage - the shopping ! We had pre-ordered a range of spares and equipment from Budget Marine in Grenada, as they were around 25% cheaper than here than in Trinidad.

New Walbro Fuel Pump Installation

It took some days to gather all the parts, and we were able to farewell our good friends on Ceilydh, who are heading for the Panama canal and the west coast of Mexico As our parts trickled in to the dealer we started work, installing what had been delivered.

So, a new Walbro FRB-13 electric diesel fuel lift pump was fitted, the old unit had done 3500 hours and was starting to fail. With associated plumbing changes, this took a couple of days to complete. The pump is used for priming the fuel system on the Cummins main engine, and for transferring fuel to an aft tank that serves  the Northern Lights AC generator.

Another two days disappeared installing a new Raymarine digital radar cable in the mast, not an easy job, but essential since the old cable had become intermittent. Note to Raymarine - your original analog cable lasted over 13 years, the new digital cable served for only 20 months. Not good enough !

We also continued another project that had started back in Tobago, which was refinishing and painting the front of the mast where the spinnaker pole track is fastened. Corrosion had set in around the pop-rivet fastenings, so we had removed the track and sanded back where necessary to bright metal, then epoxy primed the surfaces.

In Grenada I started on the high build and finishing priming, a tricky task as most of it had to be done sitting in a bosuns chair, hanging on a halyard from the top of the mast. Of course the anchorage was quite rolly, so bruises and strained muscles were the order of the day, every day.

Ley is getting plenty of shoulder exercise winching me up and down the mast.

We found Grenada to be quite sophisticated, certainly compared to Tobago, yet it remains friendly and quite laid back. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of cruising boats anchored around the island, and probably several thousand more stored for the season in the many boat yards around the coast, packed in like sardines with only inches between them. I honestly have never seen so many boats in one place in all my life.

Another One Bites The Dust

Day 7 of our passage north west and we find ourselves prompted by yet another song title - yes, another one bites the dust. This time it's our HF/SSB radio that is refusing to function.

So with Ley's help I've removed the control head, stripped and checked that (we had previous issues with a sub-standard repair), then removed the transceiver and double checked all the connections.

No obvious issues found so far. Tomorrow, when the swell abates a little, I'll move into the back of the boat and check the antenna tuner and it's connections.

Crystal Blues is more than half way to St. Helena now, with (just) 825 nautical miles to run. Sea conditions have grown big again, with an objectionable 2.5 meter quartering swell hitting us on a 7 second period. This makes movement, day to day activity and even sleeping a little strenuous and tiresome. Ley is continuing to produce gourmet food, so we're eating very well. However we are definitely looking forward to some tropical sunshine and warm weather - four days of grey sky's and rainy conditions have taken the shine of the south Atlantic !

The shine has also been missing from our solar panels - on this north westerly course, with the winter sun already well to the north of the equator, our sails are blocking the sunshine even when the clouds are not. So we're getting very little energy from the solar system, and the Northern Lights generator is doing extra duty.

Things That Work For Us # 7 - Northern Lights Genset

It's really hard to speak when you are on hands and knees, your face buried against the cabin sole, happily worshiping your genset  .... a  Northern Lights unit.

You think I'm going overboard here ?  Seriously, this is how grateful we feel !

Northern Lights M673L3 Installed On Crystal Blues

After way too many years of dealing with constant Onan genset failures, we got smart and sold the thing to someone else.  Sure it didn't run, and had done over 2700 hours. Then again we sold it for peanuts, which is more than it was worth, in our opinion.

To give you a short history, our first Onan generator was such a complete dud that the factory replaced it at 740 hours of service, no charge to us.

Unfortunately they replaced it with the same model, with the same old problems.  You can guess how much fun that was.

We had to replace the impeller every 100 hours to keep the thing reliable, replaced countless water pumps and drive couplings, and when the control board finally failed they wanted over Two Thousand US dollars for a new board. Get outa here.... !

Onan Coupling Failure - Not Happy

This was incentive enough to move us into the real world, and we purchased a compact Northern Lights M673L3 6kva 230vac generator very economically, direct from the distributor in Taiwan.  It was shipped into Langkawi Malaysia, and delivered duty and tax free, quite a saving for us.  We craned it aboard and completed the installation ourselves, and have not looked back since.

The three cylinder Japanese manufactured Shibaura diesel engine runs like a Swiss watch, smooth and silent, and now, at 1065 hours of service, I am pleased to say that not a single thing has failed since it was installed.  This is a seriously nice piece of engineering.  I actually enjoy working on it for services and oil changes ... everything is easy to access and it's done in a flash.

Onan Impeller Failure

We spend less than 1/4 of the hours maintaining the Northern Lights unit, compared to the old Onan MDK4 unit. By 1100 operating hours the last Onan had consumed five (5) impellers, two water pumps and one starter motor.

The Northern Lights at the same age has consumed just one (1) impeller, simply because I had the raw water supply valve closed when I started it.  Oops - that was my fault.

To be fair, Cummins purchased the Onan business worldwide shortly
after our initial Onan purchase, and I think they really purchased a bunch of problems.  The very many design issues that afflicted our Onan unit would probably not have existed under a Cummins design regime - certainly I don't think Cummins designers would have allowed a sea water pump with a 3/4" supply hose to be restricted to a 1/4" outlet on the heat exchanger.  The huge back pressure that tiny outlet created, apparently necessary to stop localised boiling in the heat exchanger, was the cause of the constant impeller failures.

In fact the superb support we received from the Cummins team, with our Onan problems, was influential in our decision to eventually re-power Crystal Blues with a Cummins engine - the 4BT-150.  Never the less, Genset control boards priced at over US$2,000.00 will not bring about repeat business.  In the past year I've worked on several other smaller capacity Onan units with mystery problems, on other boats, and sure enough one lucky owner also needed a control board.  He stumped up and laid down the cash - whereas my advice was to toss the whole unit and start fresh with Northern Lights.