Remember that saying that all Moms teach their kids?“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all?”Well, therefore my feelings on Colon as travel destination will stay pretty short and sweet.We’ve done our best to save money by steering clear of nightly stays docked up at a marina, but while in Colon we decided to stay at Shelter Bay Marina, which is probably as far from Colon while still being able to access the city as possible. It was glorious to be tied up to a dock for a little while.
Now, I never felt in danger in Colon and the grocery store was quite large and decently well-stocked, but Colon is the epitome of all those mega-industrial port cities that have much more to worry about than if the visitors are impressed by clean streets, clean air, nightlife, and roads/sidewalks that aren’t riddled with potholes.
But you can’t deny being impressed and awed by the dozens of freighters that line the entrance to the city. The sheer efficiency and engineering that permeates all that surrounds the canal is inspiring and dwarfing at the same time.
Given the glamorous attractions of Colon, most folks arrive in the city and immediately start their paperwork to head through the canal and get out of dodge as soon as possible.We did the same.Most folks also use an agent to help them navigate the documentation and general rigamarole, but we decided we’d give it a shot on our own.And, I’m glad we did.It’s really not that complicated, and there’s a plethora of information online to walk any would-be do-it-yourselver through the process.Easy-peasy.More or less.
The first step was to organize an official measurement of our boat.While the admeasurer was aboard, he also filled out the many documents the Canal Authority needs and gave us our invoice to be paid at the local Citibank- in cash only, of course.
I took our wad of cash to the bank- stuffed and hidden into various locations in my undergarments.Yes, in his infinite maturity, Pete couldn’t help the many stripper jokes that go along with packing your undies with twenties, but I wore the grungiest clothing my closet could afford (which unfortunately affords many options these days) and he mostly shut-up about it.
After they take your money, the Panama Canal Authority assigns you an official date to go through the canal and you’re pretty much set.Our date was about a week out after our payment, so we used the time to work on the boat- imagine that!
Have I told you my favorite line about long distance cruising??
“Circumnavigating is simply fixing your boat in exotic locations.”
Ha! Ain’t that the truth.
So, yes, the to-do list…
We hit it hard and had the yard at Shelter Bay haul out Tayrona.She was in pretty desperate need of a new coat of bottom paint and we needed to replace our rudder bearings, which is best done by pulling the boat out of the water.
As soon as we had her out of the water, we started scrapping off the barnacles and then sanding off the last paint job.Not a fun job, and we eventually realized that throwing a little money at the issue to make it go faster was well worth it.So, we hired a few of the yard workers for a half day to help us sand down our two hulls.
As soon as the first hull was sanded down, we taped her up and started painting, all the while continuing to sand down the second hull. We love our catamaran, but just slightly less when two hulls means twice the work. We were blessed with two free gallons of paint left on the boat by the previous owner, and we were double-blessed to find the exact same paint in Colon from Roberto at Club Nautico.
Doesn’t she look pretty?
Sleeping on a boat while that boat is on rafters on land is not a fun experience (the whole thing rattles in the wind and your subconscious is always waiting for the entire thing to be blown over), so we were excited to put our baby back in the water.
Motored across the bay to spend a night or two on anchor, which was plenty to take in the sights of Colon.
In order to go through the canal, a boat needs four line handers plus the captain, so we found some extra hands around town to help us out…
Felix (Liza’s hubby), and Jeanne and Denny (Pete’s Mom and step-Dad). Woo-hoo!
So, we waited out a few more days in the marina, did some last minute errands, and let our excitement grow as we waited out our scheduled day to hit the canal!
Glow plugs, exhaust elbows, high pressure fuel pumps, injectors, feed pump, throttle cables… all of this has somehow worked it’s way into our daily vocabulary and into my working understanding of how a diesel engine performs. Now, you don’t grow up the daughter of a diesel mechanic and never hear this kind of talk, so I had a faint understanding of what some of these things were before we bought our sailboat. But, faint is the key word ladies and gentlemen.
Now all that has changed. Somewhat. I’m probably not ready for a second career in diesel engine repair, although I probably should be, as that’s where I’ll find myself (working at Dad’s family business) if this all goes to shit. But, I understand a HELL of a lot more than I did a month ago about the inner workings of our marine diesel engines. It’s had its frustrating moments, but it’s been fun to learn a whole different set of skills. Dad, I now have a much deeper understanding for why wrenches just need to go whizzing, airborne across the shop from time to time. That must feel so good. Since wrenches clearly have a higher density than water, I’ve yet to try it out.
So, what exactly have we been working on? Basically, we’ve had two major fixes on the engine and plethora of random upgrades/repairs around the boat in general.
Fun in the engine, version 1.0, occurred when we were pulling away from the dock at Dinner Key Marina, right after filling up our water tanks and cleaning the topsides of the boat. Just when we got about 6-8 feet from the dock, Pete looked at me with fear in his eyes and said, “I just lost the starboard engine. Pull us back on!” We were well past this point, and I told him I couldn’t reach it. The starboard engine was still running, but it had no power to throttle up. Assuming we could still head back to our mooring ball with one engine, I told him to turn the rudder hard to port and see if we could still go straight. He said, “Nope! It won’t do it. We gotta get back to the dock.”
Oh shit. Amongst all the other plotting my brain was doing to think of ways to get us back to the dock, somehow I had free neurons up there in the ole noggin to scan all the expensive boats around us, and estimate just how much they were all worth, and just how horrible it would be to careen into one. Oh goody. Luckily the wind was almost non-existent, and what little wind we had was pushing us back to the dock. Pete zigzagged us closer and closer to the dock, only going forward and backward a few feet at a time. We nosed into the dock bow-first, at about 45 degrees to the dock, and Pete leapt onto the pontoon with a stern line, and gradually pulled the butt-end of the boat flush with the dock.
Moral of the story- always check to make sure your engines will engage and throttle up BEFORE leaving the dock.
Once we got tied up again, Pete jumped down in the engine compartment, and I worked the throttle at the helm. The engine would idle just fine and go into gear just fine, but it wouldn’t actually throttle up and spin the propeller. We ripped apart the throttle box, but didn’t see anything interesting right away. Nothing different in the cables around the engine either.
After plenty of experimenting, we realized the throttle cable wasn’t actually pushing the engine to rev up, in either forward or reverse, but it did have some push at very low speed. If went very slowly, we could get back out to our mooring ball, and really dig into the problem. Our budget doesn’t really allow for nights spent on a T-dock for $4 per foot, per night (at 38 feet, you do the math), so we knew we’d feel better back on our mooring ball. We pushed off from the dock again, this time knowing that at very low speeds we could still get some steerage from our starboard engine.
We made it out to the mooring field and tied up just fine. Whew! After some substantial digging into our throttle box, we found a snapped throttle control cable. That it’ll do it.
Luckily, Pete was heading to Austral International the following day to pick up spare filters and impellers, and, luckily, they kept these throttle cables in stock. We picked up two and replaced both the port and starboard cables with new, and kept the old, still working, port cable for a spare.
Fun in the engine, version 2.0, has been an ongoing problem, and after weeks of troubleshooting, I think we have found the culprit. Basically, our port engine was taking a very long time to start. It always starts eventually, but we are cranking the poor girl for like 30-40 seconds to get her to go. Sometimes 50-60 seconds. That’s a long time. And, it’s gotten worse during the month that we’ve owned the boat. We certainly need our engines to be in tip-top condition before heading overseas, so we’ve been working our tails off to get this issue fixed. Basically, Pops told us that it could be one of two things: either the engine isn’t getting enough fuel or it’s not getting enough pressure, and cross your fingers that it’s a fuel issue because compression issues are one scary and expensive thing to fix.
So, logically, we started with the fuel injection system. We found a receipt that said Kenan (the last owner) had all the injectors rebuilt a week before we bought the boat, so we crossed that off the lift. Pete pried off the fuel injector pump, and I took it to bumblef%$# Miami to get it serviced. Some of the o-rings were bad, and it certainly looks prettier now, so we hoped this would fix it. After putting the bugger back on the engine, we found no change in the cranking time. So, we pulled off the feed pump, disassembled it, cleaned it up, and put it back on. Still no change.
In the meantime, we also picked up two new exhaust elbows and replaced them on both engines. These guys help take the engine exhaust from the engine and mix it with sea water to cool it slightly so it can, then, go through a plastic muffler and out the exhaust hole on the side of the boat. This was one hell of a job as the nuts and bolts holding the elbows on the engine were a horrible, corroded mess. Pete spend many days hammering on the connections, soaking them in brake fluid, and expending lots of elbow grease to get the old elbows off. But, take a look at these before and after pictures. I think you’ll agree that it was worth it.
Look at the inside of that thing!! Gross!
So, given the amount of disgusting gunk that was almost completely plugging up our port-side exhaust elbow, we started to worry that the engine had been running way too hot (due to the lack of proper movement of coolant and exhaust), and maybe there was a crack in one of our pistons. Dear lord. This would be a massive job. MASSIVE. It requires lifting out the engine from the boat, removing a part that is both buried WAY inside the engine and VERY expensive to replace. Sweet Jesus, this could wreck our cruising budget.
After more troubleshooting with the great and powerful mechanic behind Pashouwer Farm Repair, he suggested looking at the glow plugs. And crossing those fingers even harder. This would a very cheap and easy fix, and it would show all the same symptoms that we were seeing in our port engine (whom Pete has semi-affectionately named Wendy). We pulled out all the glow plugs from both engines, tested them by running voltage through each one, and it looked as though four of the six were dead, going 0 for 3 on the port side. Or, we were sucky glow plug testers.
Glow plugs are used to warm up the cylinders before cranking your engine. They help start the engine faster by making the temperature high enough to catalyze ignition of the fuel. They are not spark plugs, and don’t confuse them as such. This is mechanic sacrilege, akin to calling the Super Bowl and the World Series, “you know, basically the same thing.” Hmmm… I guess Pete wouldn’t get that reference, but we won’t tell him I mentioned that, will we? 😉
Since they were cheap, we bought six- three new glow plugs to replace the dead ones on the port engine, one for the starboard side, and two more as spares for the starboard engine (Pete calls this little lady Belinda).
There are few things that bring the same level of relief as fixing a mechanical issue that’s taken weeks of troubleshooting, many hours of grunt work, and plenty of attempts that we thought would surely be the problem. Lordly, it feels amazing! Glow plugs. I adore your ease of removal and low price tag. It’s an odd item to go out on an engine, but I’m still over the moon that this was our issue. Also, it was really fun to troubleshot and “talk shop” with my father- getting to see him in his element reinforced the great respect I have for the guy. As soon as we popped the new ones in, our port engine started up like a champ. The progressively colder weather here Florida also explains why the issue was getting worse.
To go from cranking our engine for up to a minute, to getting it to start up immediately is a glorious, glorious feeling! Ahhhhh!
Some other fun times we’ve had aboard Tayrona lately include:
The installation of our brand new SSB radio. Thanks Gerry and Leo at Nautor Marine! These guys were amazing, and we’ll recommend wholeheartedly. Great guys, who did a bang-up job.
We installed bus bars for the wiring to and from the batteries and put our batteries into battery boxes. We are continually working on cleaning up the wiring around the boat. Doesn’t this…
…look so much nicer than this?
After much debate and looking into each and every alternative, we bought a new chartplotter and radar combo. The chartplotter that came with the boat worked just fine, but the radar unit wasn’t functioning at all. We spent a good deal of time troubleshooting it, but couldn’t figure it out. Also, we were having a very hard time finding the SD cards that are placed in the chartplotter to show the maps of where we’ll be cruising. The chips aren’t made anymore, so we had no promise that we’d find them for all the placed we’d like to visit. Both the plotter and radar units were on the older side, so we decided it was time for an upgrade. We installed both ourselves, which wasn’t hard, but it was time consuming.
We’ve changed oil, oil filters, and fuel filters on both our engines, as well as cleaned out the raw water strainers and replaced any bad impellers.
We marked the anchor chain in 5-meter increments. How this wasn’t already done on a 14-year-old boat astounds me. (2 zip ties = 20 meters of chain)
We’ve been spending so much money that we are also working hard to sell some things on the boat for a little extra cash flow in the other direction. We sold an extra dinghy, a second outboard motor, the old fridge compressor, the old SSB and tuner, the old chartplotter, but we are still will working on selling our Aquair Wind and Towing Generator. Any takers? 😉
Pete rewired the windless, as the wiring was a short circuit waiting to happen. Bare wires next to wet anchor chain… not a good plan.
We also bit the bullet and bought a new wind generator! Like I said in an earlier post, we are really working hard to be energy neutral. One of the reasons that our port engine is in much worse shape than the starboard is due to the fact that it was being run once a day to charge our batteries. If we can make all the energy we need on a daily basis, using solar and wind, then we don’t need to run the engines just to charge our batteries.
And, low and behold, we also found the time to actually go sailing for an afternoon! We moved from a mooring ball at Dinner Key Marina to an anchorage in Marine Stadium. From here, the views of downtown Miami are stunning- especially at night. And the rent is cheap too. We like free.
Oh yeah… and then I turned 32. That was a beautiful break from boat work, and we had a blast! For my birthday, Pete took me around the city to actually enjoy the sights of Miami. We walked around downtown, along the port, did some birthday present shopping, had mojitos and then a delicious seafood dinner. All of this was fabulous, buy my favorite part of the day was a little scavenger hunt that Pete organized for me on the boat. It was adorable and a fun adventure. I’m amazed at all the hiding places he found in our little 38’ by 20’ boat. I am most definitely a very lucky lady.
Mostly, we are simply waiting for the right weather window in order to cross the Gulf Stream and head to the Bahamas, but we are also using the time to get our boat in perfect condition to head offshore extensively. If we have the time, we figure we should use it to better our boat, as much as our skills and budget will allow. We are crossing our fingers to be heading to the Bahamas within a week. Cross yours for us while you’re at it. Can’t hurt, right?
It’s fun to get yourself all worked up into some good melodrama sometimes, but let’s be honest. Yes, we’ve been working our tails off lately, but we also took a few days off to entertain our first visitors aboard, and the respite was really nice. I like to be cheeky, but, don’t worry, we are far from turning into this:
Why don’t I quit the shenanigans and just begin…
We’ve been in Fort Lauderdale for about two weeks. We’ve made to-do list upon to-do list, checking off everything only to start the next day with a fresh list of new items to take care of.
After arriving in the mooring field here, we quickly met our neighbors and realized that tossing ideas around with other sailors is the absolute best way to bring our lowly ignorance up several notches in the “sailboat refit” school of hard knocks. We found a friend who runs a side-business in sailboat electrical systems, and we invited him aboard to give us an energy audit. He hooked up his multimeters and took readings on exactly how much energy we are using and how much our solar panels currently provide. Like in most boats, our refrigerator is the energy hog aboard, taking up 80-90% of our energy use.
So, after looking at the numbers, Pete and I have made it our goal to become energy neutral. We want to create 100-125% of our energy usage using solar and wind power, so we don’t need to rely on running the engines (and using fossil fuels) to create enough energy for our lives aboard. Instead of going out and buying a whole bunch of new solar panels and a fancy wind generator right away, we started attacking this goal by making better use of the equipment we already have onboard. We purchased a new and very energy-efficient refrigerator compressor from Engel and we also bought a top of the line Outback MMPT charge controller for the solar panels. The charge controller works to monitor the voltage we are creating with the solar, and convert it to the 12volts that our batteries can handle, but it does this in a way that best utilizes any extra voltage we are creating, over the 12v that our batteries can handle. Instead of burning off any extra energy we might have at any given moment (like our old device would do), this new controller converts this excess to something different, by cycling between more amps/less voltage and less amps/more voltage, and is still able to make use of this excess energy instead of wasting it.
While Pete worked to understand how our electrical systems work, I set out to get our single-sideband radio (SSB) up and running. The SSB radio is basically the marine equivalent to the ham radio, which saw its heyday in the 60s and 70s. When you are thousands of miles offshore, the SSB radio is really the only way to communicate with land, other than using satellite phones, but there’s no monthly plan or minutes to buy. It’s also our plan to use the SSB to get our daily weather reports while offshore. These babies haven’t really advanced all that much since the 60s, and since you’re bouncing your radio waves off the earth’s ionosphere, let’s just say connections can get a little crackly at times.
After several days of swearing at the machine and consulting every single “Idiot’s guide to marine SSB use…” or similarly titled literature, I gave up. I was realizing that our SSB equipment onboard is old, not really installed to-the-letter, and just plain wouldn’t work.
So I threw up a white flag and called in the experts. Gerry and Leo from Nautor Marine met us at the marina, dinghied out to Tayrona with us, and took a look at our set-up.
I knew it wasn’t great when they started out the conversation with, “you know with satellite phones and trackers from Spot and Delorme, you can get around having an SSB if you wanted….” Oh geez. Basically, our equipment was junk. The radio was old and probably didn’t work. The antenna and tuner were made for on land ham radio use (which just doesn’t work on a boat), and was horribly out of date. They ran down the prices to scrap and start fresh with a new system, and we kept our calm outside, but were both saying “OH SWEET JESUS, THAT’S EXPENSIVE!” on the inside. Amongst other expletives, I’m sure.
In the end, we decided that it was important for us to have an SSB on board, for weather and for communication with other sailors offshore, so we bit the bullet, bought the new parts, and we’ll be getting a new system installed in a few days.
THEN… there was some fun!! Pete’s Dad and his sister Liza came down to Florida officially to pick up the van we borrowed, but unofficially to go snorkeling, lobster fishing, and sailing with us. We bought lobster licenses, and gave it our best shot, but were eluded by the little crustaceans. But, we had blast out at anchor anyway!
We even played around with the cast net one afternoon. This baby is one tricky beast.
Had a few too many rainy, cloudy, stormy days, but such is the life of a sailor.
Since they left, it’s been back to the grindstone. In the last few days, we have:
Installed both the new fridge and the new charge controller (yes those are Pete’s feet sticking out of the storage compartment).
Organized (or attempted to organize) the wiring around the boat. This has been a huge job, as doing things the quick way and the right way are two VERY different things when it comes to electrical work. Whoever first set up the wiring on our boat was a staunch proponent of the former option, over the latter, unfortunately for us.
Moved our VHF radio to a different spot in the nav station, in order to make way for our new SSB.
Ordered countless parts to be replaced once they arrive in several months (do parts always take two months to arrive? Jeez…) and our loving family carries them down to us in their suitcases.
Rewired all the solar panels in series, instead of parallel, as our new, fancy charge controller can handle a lot more voltage at any given time.
Peeled off the old name stickers and replaced them with our own. Yay! Our boat finally says “Tayrona.”
Acquired all of our official documents from the coast guard, saying that, yes, we really do own the boat, and, yes, we can leave the country with it.
Found that our boat does, in fact, come with a unit to plug into shore power, and wired that in.
Spent a morning provisioning at the local big box store, filling our storage with nonperishables that’ll be much more expensive in the caribbean.
Dug out an old wind/towing generator that came with the boat, and took it from being completely nonfunctional to producing an amp or two per day.
Attacked the tedious list of items that showed up on our survey- adding valves where they should be valves, putting our batteries in battery boxes, bought new life jackets and flares… ect, ect.
Oh man… there’s no way I’ll cover all the little do-dads and do-hickies that we’ve had to buy, replace, or repair. It’s a darn good thing that both Home Depot and West Marine are in walking distance from the marina.
If I had to summarize, let’s just say that when it comes to a boat, there’s a lot to waterproof that doesn’t like to stay waterproofed, a lot that should be wired correctly and efficiently that generally isn’t, communication systems that go out of date faster than your iPhone, and plenty of previous owners who’ve left plenty of items to organize (why the heck did they put that here?), understand (what the heck does this thing do?), and clean up (seriously, if I find another screw hole drilled in this boat, I’m going to scream).
But, in the end, it’s been fun. I’m astounded each day by how much we are learning about our boat and about being a boat owner. We’ll get there. Just keep swimming, right?
