2015 Late Winter Maintenance.

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. IMGP6066

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!

Happy New Year!! and shovel, shovel, shovel. And an apology.

Happy New Year everyone!

On one of the first days of the new year we awoke to a light dusting of snow and large flakes falling lazily. It was a post card morning. We sipped at coffee and marveled at the simple beauties of our rural life. I even thought to run down and take a picture of the boat shed nicely protecting the COLUMBIA III from the elements . . . ” Yes, that was a big project but gosh I was sure smart to build that thing” . . . and I returned to the house smug in my “aren’t I great with my boat shed” kinda feelings . . .

But as usual in my life, any time I get just a little too full of myself something happens to correct such a silly imbalance. Something happens . . . like the sound of our son-in-law racing down to the dock yelling, “THE BOAT SHED IS SINKING!!!!”

Well, whilst i was smugly sipping my self-satisfied coffee those “lazy” flakes had turned into a blizzard! And a heavy, wet blizzard to boot. The shed we built has huge amounts of reserve buoyancy if I pump out all the ballast water from the 32 8′ deep flotation tanks . . . But if a smug and self-satisfied captain rests on his laurels a little too much and doesn’t anticipate a 14″ snow fall in 5 hours . . . his boat shed float could get dangerously low in the water with the expensive bits and pieces on the roof (like $10,000 worth of radars . . ) of his PRECIOUS COLUMBIA III in peril.

So, it was quite simple, really. Fern, Ross, Luke, Farlyn, Jody, Rowan, Miray and Theo shoveled snow for 4 hours straight and pumped out the tanks to the level they should have been at before the snow fall . . .

Just chock that up to life lesson #2,389,436. and a slightly less smug Captain.

“Uhmm . . . thanks everyone for the hand . . . I should have had that pumped out before the snow season. Sorry.”

PS: no pictures of that frantic little episode.

Summer 2014

Oh my gosh!! I don’t think skippers should write blogs . . . I get so far behind and really cool things happen and I forget to grab my camera and capture the blog-moments that I “should”. Here is a random summer sampler. Steve took many of these photos. He gave me his stash of shots after I had already posted many on our site so here are some more!

Luke. Lead guide, lead skipper after me, lead shipwright, awesome photographer dude and pretty darn great as a son-in-law too.

Kayak guide and life time (at least her life time) friend and neighbour, Robin Humphreys.

White-sided dolphins follow the COLUMBIA III

Oh hey! Now this is exciting! A new tender for the Columbia III. Just a little bigger than the old one and kinda shiny on the arrival date. It took almost 6 months to custom make and we pressed it into service on the “fly” in mid June.

Tavish on a photo shoot of the COLUMBIA III with Fern and I yelling, “TAVISH HANG ON YOU FOOL!”

Ah, those perfect, still, foggy Broughton mornings before the sun burns off the mists and the blue sky is revealed.

Ace guide/paramedic, Luke Roman. Always the same great smile . . . he even tolerates me.

Here is a guest, a firefighter from BC with a . . . well . . . a weird hat!

OK, Ok, it can rain SOMETIMES.

The group leaves the mothership for another day at “sea”.

Why does everyone seem so relaxed! The skipper is headed for the rocks!

Do you really need a telephoto lens for a rock that close?

Lots of steep granite in BC.

Nice t-shirt.

We so see sunsets in the Great Bear Rainforest.

. . . and waterfalls . . . Here is Phil from Seattle. This summer his private group chartered the COLUMBIA III for the second time. I think we will see them again.

. . . and Phil is an artist. From the guest logbook, this is Fern’s fiddle on the salon sofa.

and more water falls . . .

These are guests returning from bear viewing in the fall Great Bear.

and a few of Steve’s shots:

Another crew shot. Christina Purcell filled in so Fern could have some much deserved time off the boat.

The skipper hard at work as usual. It’s a tough job being so busy . . . .

Boomer Jerritt came again this year. Here are a few shots:

Crew shot: Erin Rowsell loves to cook and take pictures, so she asked to be on Boomer’s tour.

Cameras and music!

Don’t piss off the Skipper!!

Here is our son, Tavish and a group Ian McAllister of Pacific Wild brought together. We try to donate the use of the COLUMBIA III to Ian and Karen each year to help support their great conservation work on the BC coast.

Mark Hobson came with us again this year and the weather certainly cooperated!

The Broughton Archipelago was full of orca this summer. It was marvelous to see them all!

Here is a cool sequence. Steve caught these orcas that decided they wanted to “check us out” Here one is approaching us . . .

and diving under the COLUMBIA III !!!

and you can just see the white eye-patch below the handrail . . .

and out the other side of the boat . . .

and breaking the surface on the other side. With another orca clearly visible under water!

And another sequence of shots: A few humpback whales are working together to get dinner. One whale circles a school of small fish whilst emitting a stream of bubbles . . . This is called “bubble netting”

and then the other whales charge the concentrated fish school with their mouths open.

and load up on dinner. This can happen over and over with lots of great photo opportunities and just plain awesome to watch . . . to heck with the cameras.