As per usual, I putter on the COLUMBIA III on various behind-the-scenes tasks. And as the month of May approaches the pace seems to slowly pick up. Here is the usual catalogue of crazily disparate details that go into keeping a heritage boat operating.

#1 of many. The main engine had a coolant circulation pump that was getting tired. I removed the pump to have the bearings changed and the shop deemed the pump too worn to repair. Unfortunately, it took 6 weeks to find a replacement pump and then its mounting specifications where different. It took me a while to create an adaptor plate on which to mount the new pump.

The old pump comes off . . .

And the new pump goes on.

As they say in the magazines, “the belt guards have been remove for clarity. Never operate equipment without safety guards in place.”

And both generators were due for some mid-life service. So I removed the heat exchangers for cleaning and inspection. injectors and fuel pumps out for over haul, thermostats, belts, riser boots,  and one water pump  and one heat exchanger core replaced.

And its always amazing how many tools it requires to complete a job.

And how big a mess I can create on the  ship’s small workbench. Here are the 2 heat exchangers off the gensets sitting on  the workbench.

Skipper Farlyn helps reinstall all the bits and pieces on the gensets and she set up the valve clearances on both generators.  I think the 6.5 kilowatt generators cost about $10,000 each. Funny how the 4,000 hour rebuild cost  over $3000 for a small cardboard box of parts. My labour was free  . . . but I  pay Farlyn.

And the office still needs my attention! I come up from the boat shed and check the phone for messages (there is only cell coverage in the office as we have a “boosted signal” here only) and scan the emails for items that need immediate attention. When guests and potential guests call I often mention that I am just up from the boat . . . and I mean it. The office is “coveralls friendly”.

Then Steve showed up to begin work and my dogged pace bumps up several notches to keep ahead of Steve. First we got the kayaks off the roof and into the boat shed rafters and gave the whole boat a scrub just to get ourselves oriented.

One of Steve’s first tasks was to remove a substantial portion of our black water plumbing and replacing it with new hose to ensure all systems are “go” for the summer. No one wants black water woes mid season!

After all the work in the engine room we scrubbed the whole E/R with soap and water and Steve polished the checker plate aluminum floor boards to add that ‘CIII sparkle’ to even the engine room.

One fun project was the location, purchase and installation of a new 19″ navigation monitor. The old 17″ monitor was good, but I really wanted one that could be manually dimmed for night operations. Of course, they make monitors like this, but they are only the top of the line, marine navigation monitors that have this capability. The manual dimmer is essential as the skipper needs to be able to reach over in total darkness and find the knob that will bring the GPS plotter screen into view, and then return the screen to darkness again. Any sort of menu-driven option for screen dimming requires a mouse and a screen brightness that allows enough visibility to find the dimming menu. When I am running at night, I don’t want to be fumbling for a mouse trying to change my screen intensity. Obviously the big boys felt the same way . . . only for me, a $4000.00 monitor was a big investment! Of course, the new monitor was powered from a different source and needed an external speaker installed . . . so lots of rewiring and rerouting of “stuff” and a custom aluminium stand had to be created.

Here you can see the radar image on the right, the GPS plotter image on the left and the orange radar overly on the left screen that matches the image on the right screen. The AIS traffic is listed on the panel on the far right.

Then when I was finished with the wheel house, Steve took it all apart again! The wheel house has a two tone decor and Steve pulled all the wires, knobs, radios, window handles, control panels etc etc .!!! off the walls so he could sand and paint the dark green accent.

And while he was in the wheel house making a mess we decided to revarnish the bright work in the wheel house including the bits and pieces we could remove for ease of sanding like the cabinet doors and the driver’s seat step.

And we are trying an experiment. We use 50′ of 5/8th” galvanized chain and we have 300′ of 5/8th stainless steel cable  for our anchor rode. The stainless and the galvanizing are not a happy combination and the zinc galvanizing disappears very quickly from the chain. And rusty chain stains the decks and looks crappy! SO . . . new chain this year, and a novel idea of separating the chain from the SS cable by 12″ of 3/4″ spectra rope. This is the insanely strong new fibre rope that far exceeds the load rating of the chain. i am hoping this rope link will act as an electrolysis insulator and protect the zinc coating on the chain. But the anchor and the old chain had to be removed to a float,

.  . .and we painted the winch as it’s easier to do with the rode off of it . . .

And then we reinstalled the cable and the chain.

Then there was the sofa. A really nice, leather sofa. The seat is a large expanse of smooth leather and i always worry that it might get damaged accidentally during the course of the summer. I called our “upholstery specialist” and he informed me it could take weeks to get a colour matched hide so as a precaution, I ordered 1 1/2 hides. Now, I carry a lot of spares on the CIII; everything from spare coffee makers to spare water pumps. I expect I have $20,000 dollars worth of spares aboard. And now spare leather. Just in case.  

And off we went to the ship yard for our annual haul-out, washing, painting and zincs. I am always nervous as the boat lifts clear of the water. It had been 13 months since I last saw her undersides. 13 months since  our last intense refasteneing of the hull. “I hope everything is ok. I hope there are no surprises like a propeller that has been damaged on a hidden dead-head . . .”

But the ship yard crews washed her clean and all was well. She hardly needed a paint job.

 

So Steve and I dodged bad weather and got the ship’s underwater portion of the hull painted , the boot top painted and the water-line gumwood oiled. The back deck is not its usual tidy self when “on the hard”.

We even had time to cork an extra 60 bottles of wine and start another 300 bottles for the 2016 season. This year we will be casking our red wines in oak for the extra special “note”.

Here`s a `small town`story. I bought a new and high quality radar last year and that was stretching the budget for 2014. But I really wanted the Automatic Radar Plotting Aid (ARPA) which is an optional circuit board for the radar. So this year I called the dealer and ordered in the component. ($700.) When the CIII was on the hard in the shipyard I thought it would be a good time to take the radar into the shop for the installation . ..  But when I walked up to the wheel house the radar was GONE!  But I had a pretty good idea of where it was. After a quick call I determined that the radar tech was working in the area and saw the Columbia III in the shipyard and stopped by to ask if I wanted him to take the radar to the shop. As no one was aboard at that moment, he just took it anyhow . . .

ARPA tracks a selected target and predicts its course to determine if a risk of collision exists.

 

Here’s a cool little side note, on the way home from the shipyard, a 3 hour run in the CIII, a deer swam past in the middle of a swirl of Okisollo Channel tidal whirlpools and back eddies!

 

And Lead Guide/Skipper, Luke was busy when Steve and I were in the shipyard. He stripped the high profile salon table to bare wood and is in the process of refinishing it. After the stain/sealer he now has about 7 coats of finish on the table and it is starting to look pretty nice!

 

Grandson Theo helped the whole family get the CIII back into the shed so we can get serious with our real spring maintenance! Stay tuned for the next exciting, even scintillating blog installment of `Spring Sanding, Painting and Varnishing!