Maintenance Log for Syzygy

We’re discovering that many things installed through the deck are sans backing plates.  The dodger was just screwed in, which in my opinion is not solid enough for how much force that dodger experiences.  The staysail halyard block was backed with washers, which has rusted into powder because no sealant was used on deck.  The bow pulpit backing plates were aluminum, which had so reacted with the stainless bolts in the salty environment of the anchor locker that they had corroded clear in half. We made custom 316 stainless plates for each application.  In each case we also cored out the deck, filled the cavity with thickened epoxy, and redrilled for the bolts.  In short, we did it the way we were supposed to in order to insure that water never permeates to rot out our cored deck. I’m willing to guess we’ll have many more of these to do–probably every time we open up a new ceiling panel.  Much thanks to John Ryan for providing the stainless steel, making our bow pulpit plates for us, and giving us essential advice at every step of the way.

Every last one of them. We spent a fortune on hose (150 ft of Trident #148, 1.5"). Jon and Jonny did this work. The old hoses were cracked, leaking, sucking air, holding decade old bilge water in low spots–you name a form of shittiness and our hoses had it. Now it’s all fresh white high-quality hose that should last forever. The trident #148 is a smooth interior, heavy-duty white vinyl hose with a hard pvc helix for strengthening. It is marketed as a sanitation hose, but is recommended by Trident for bilge applications as well. We had a great deal on it through a friend so it made sense to go with it. The new hose was 10 times as stiff as the old corrugated stuff, so it was a bear running it. It required expansion of several holes, and all three of us to work it through the tough spots simultaneously. It just barely worked, in fact. Slightly stiffer and we may have had to trade it in for some other type of hose. But now that it’s done I don’t regret it. 

The old speakers were blown out (two in cockpit, two in cabin) and the old stereo had no auxiliary input for the ipod/computer.  After tolerating a noisy tape-adaptor system for four months we elected to spring for new stuff. We bought a bottom dollar “marine” stereo (only marine thing about it was a piece of plastic across the top of it, sealing off a couple screw holes), two 6.5″ speakers for the cockpit, and two mounted box-like speakers for the cabin. We ran fresh Ancor tinned marine-grade speaker wire for all of them. I did it by the book in splicing, soldering, and heat shrinking the dozen wires out the back of the stereo, and mounted a little beautiful 1/8″ headphone jack in the bulkhead for the ipod hookup.

Mounting the speakers in the cockpit proved far more of a job than I anticipated. I had hoped that the new speakers would just screw into the old mounting holes, but of course that wasn’t the case. So we had to cut out a new ring of plywood. While we were at it we went ahead and replaced the sealing beckson port that houses the speaker.

Previously, I spent a few hours in the berkeley workyard replacing the coax connectors on the old coax, while the mast was on the ground.  Well it figures that as soon as we put the mast in the boat, I notice that the old coax is completely snapped (dielectric was brittle) right at the exit hole of the mast.  So we ended up replacing it after all.  We bought RG-213 from Svendsen’s, which is now the replacement for RG-8U.  (internet research told me that the RG-8U is an old designation no longer made, and that the RG-213 is for all intensive purposes identical).   The RG-213 is thicker and higher quality than the standard RG-58x.

It was less enjoyable doing the work while hanging in the bosun’s chair at the top of the mast than when the mast was on the ground.

This time, instead of making a power-sucking butt connection in the bilge, I just ran the coax all the way back to the radio, so it’s unbroken from masthead to the radio.  The next time the mast is pulled, all the bilge wires will need to be snipped and then reconnected.  I deemed it more prudent to make permanent, waterproof connections (with adhesive-lined heat shrink) than to leave connectors down in the wet environment of the bilge.  Now, even if the bilge fills with water our VHF and trilight should continue to function.

Boy was this a task.

First, we chipped all the resin out of the bilge.  When the boat was built in ‘78 the factory poured a ton of resin into the bilge to smooth it and seal it and even it out. This was a well-intentioned but ultimately poor decision. Over the 30 years since, the resin had cracked and come unbonded from the underlying fiberglass in many places, allowing water (and more recently, our leaking diesel fuel) to penetrate underneath and hang out, doing god knows what to our keelbolts and other bilge paraphernalia. Anyway, it was nasty and not cool, and we decided to fix it. It took about 50 hours of labor, split between all of us, to chip out the resin chunks and then chip it down relatively smooth for painting purposes.

Then Jon laboriously cleaned the engine with simple green, brushes, toothbrushes, and a hose, letting the gunk drain into the bilge. As the bilge level rose, he would pump it out into large bins already in the cart on the dock, using our manual bilge pump with a hose run out a portlight. Once the bins were full, jonny and jon would cart them up to the restrooms to be inserted into the city sewer system (we were very conscious not to dispose of it into the marina water). After finishing the engine, he scrubbed and cleaned the entire bilge.

Finally, all three of us spent most of a day painting the bilge with a Sherwin-Williams “Seaguard” two-part epoxy paint. The stuff is thick as hell, and I hope that it will stick forever and ever and never flake off. The fumes were potent and we probably took a year off our lives by breathing it in such closed quarters.

It looks fantastic, and it makes us all proud. It wasn’t the most critical project, but I’m glad we spent the time and money to do it. It’s now a pleasure to do the bilge wiring and plumbing and other various work down below.

I read on Brion Toss’s forum spartalk about using HM (high-modulus) line–amsteel is my brand name of choice right now–for lifelines. This idea appeals for many reasons:

1) Much cheaper–no need to have ends swaged, no need for mini (yet still expensive) turnbuckles

2) Much easier–we can splice the eyes ourselves, and use lashings for the ends, making it simple to maintain them ourselves

3) Stronger–for it’s diameter, stronger than wire

4) Prettier–we used amsteel blue, which nicely matches our boat. It’s unusual to see blue lifelines, and it’s cool.

It took over two weeks to finish this task, working on it an hour or so a day on average.  Mainly because we didn’t have all the materials on hand, then ran out of some stuff, dropped one of the latches in the water, couldn’t decide how we wanted to do the lashings, etc.  But now everything is finished and we’re satisfied with the result.  My only concern is that the blue is going to wash right off the amsteel, and then it won’t look as cool.

It took us a few weeks after the mast was stepped to finish the job. First we needed to tune the mast in the boat.  To start with, the mast was rotated slightly; not aligned with the centerline of the boat.  Jon went up to the spreaders with a tape measure and we tried to measure from  the spreader tips to the backstay to assess the rotation, but it became clear that the method wasn’t working.  So instead Jon went into the bilge and eyeballed the shape of the mast on the step (which is perfectly contoured to the mast base) while I used the disconnected upper shroud to wrench the mast around.  It was somewhat disconcerting to be rotating the whole mast without much control.  After we got it rotationally aligned, Jon went back up the mast to the top, and we measured from the top to the chainplate on each side, and I painstakingly adjust the uppers (all other shrouds slack) until we got the exact same measurement on each side.  So then it was centered at the very bottom of the mast and the very top, but at the deck it was deflected to port by 3/4".  Fortunately, when we pushed on the mast at the deck it readily flexed, so we bowlined a line around the mast, led it through the jib fairlead and back to a winch, and a small amount of force pulled the mast into precise alignment. Then we used a pound of modeling clay, obtained at our local Michaels, to create a floor for the spartite.  In truth we didn’t use spartite, but rather the generic McMaster-Carr equivalent (part no: 8644K18) for half the price (on the excellent advice of Bryan Genez).  It is a "flexible urethane casting compound".  We used two one-quart containers, $32.33 each, and it was the perfect amount. A momentary digression: the original shape of our mast partners was not conducive to a spartite application so we modified it.  The shape of the valiant mast partner is an inverted cone–if the spartite is applied without modifying the partners, the plug will never come out of the boat when the mast is pulled–it will have to be cut out, negating half the benefit of using spartite in the first place.  I corrected this by filling in the void area with epoxy thickened with high-density filler (thick like peanut butter), to make the internal surface of the partner vertical and smooth.  In retrospect I wish I had even formed it into a slightly upward shaped cone, just to be sure that it will come out easily, but I think it will be ok. Pouring the spartite was fun (mostly because it was easy).  We let it set for about 4 days before removing the line that was centering the mast and tightening the other shrouds. Then we constructed a mast boot from a thick tire inner tube.  We followed the instructions in one of the books I have, offshore passage-making tips by bill seifert.  It involves two large hose clamps and some rubber glue.  Cheap, easy, and effective. As a final touch, Jonny made a canvas cover for the rubber boot to protect it from the sun (sorry there’s no picture of this).

The Profurl has sealed bearings and supposedly cannot be serviced (throw it away and buy another is the policy among riggers). I found a site on the internet that explains how to do it, what parts you need, and what tools you need. I am very thankful to Andrew Bray for posting this information, and also Chris Zinger who wrote up super detailed instructions (available through Andrew Bray via his website). Without their pioneering efforts on this project, we would never have been able to do it. They are gentlemen and sailing scholars, and I salute them. The hardest part was pulling the seals out. We tried the methods described, but to no avail. In the end we used the dremel tool to very carefully grind away the steel ring that exists inside the nitrile rubber seals. Fortunately, we did not damage the sealing surface using this method (we had damaged the sealing surface already, before we knew any better, trying to pry back the edge of the seal with an awl to get grease in/out–damn–oh well).