Sustaining the machinery

Taking care of the engine, transmission, wiring, plumbing, and other machinery on a boat is an important responsibility. Carefree cruising in a power boat begins with confidence in the propulsion package. That said, actually getting to the machinery on an Albin-25 is not an inconsequential evolution. It's not like popping the hood on your passenger car.

Not all Albin-25s are alike, but none has easy access to the engine space. On Ms. Bettencourt, the work begins with taking up the wooden floor panels. Lifting the panel closest to the aft cabin provides relatively easy access to the raw water intake strainer, the primary fuel filter, and the propeller shaft stuffing box. Today, I cleaned some debris out of the raw water strainer, checked the fuel filter for water (found none) and tightened the stuffing box a bit to compensate for worn packing.

Taking out the next floor panel forward allows for inspection of the engine exhaust cooling elbow, coolant circulating hoses and the aft bilge pump.

(Note that the operator's seat, which is normally over the engine box, has been removed from its brackets and stowed across the bench seats against the aft cabin door).

With these two deck panels and the operator's seat out of the way, it is now possible to swing the half-bulkhead leading to the forward cabin forward on its hinges, then unlatch and swing the engine box lid upwards and back toward the rear of the middle cabin. I have done this while underway and it is not fun. Anyway, we can now view the engine and and the sound insulation on the inside of the engine box lid.

This is a Universal 54-24 diesel engine. Only about 1,000 of these Kubota marine conversion 3-cylinder engines were made, between 1977 and 1983. That means this one is between 29 and 35 years old. The engine has about 2,500 hours on it, which makes it relatively youthful. It is not unusual for a well cared for little diesel to go 10-15,000 hours before it needs a major overhaul.

(You can click on these pictures to enlarge them, if you wish to examine anything more closely).

On our last cruise, we ran this engine for about 18 hours at 85% of its power capacity. I think that's equivalent to running a modern passenger car about 1,000 miles at 60 miles and hour.

Today, while I had the lid up, I added about a half-pint of antifreeze, checked all the hose connections for leaks (found none) and tightened the alternator belt. I also checked the oil, then moved to the rear of the engine to check the transmission fluid and propeller shaft flange.

This picture is looking down on the top of the engine from the rear. The transmission is that box shaped gizmo at the bottom of the photo. There is a plug on the top of the transmission which may be unscrewed to check the fluid level. Ms. Bettencourt didn't need any today.

At the very bottom of this photo you can see a flange with bolts through it. This is where the transmission attaches to the propeller shaft. I always check those fasteners to make sure they are tight.

The final deck panel to come up is the one under the helmsman's feet at the steering position. A 20-gallon waste holding tank resides under there, together with a Y-valve that allows waste removal either through a deck pump-out fitting or overboard through the hull by means of a diaphragm hand pump. I keep the Y-valve locked in the deck pump-out position and the through-hull valve closed.

I pulled this panel up today mainly to check hose and pump connections and to retrieve a screwdriver I had dropped behind the tank.

Everything was in order in this department, so it's time to put it back together. I had everything buttoned up in about 10 minutes.

The engine will get a major service shortly before Ms. Bettencourt's (presently unscheduled) next voyage.

That work will involve an oil and oil filter change, changing the primary fuel filter cartridge, testing the batteries, checking all battery connections, and re-checking everything I checked today.

Do real mariners sew curtains?

The ragged remnants of moldy old curtains hung in her windows when Ms. Bettencourt came to me in 2004. When I pulled them down, the rusty curtain rods and plastic brackets came with them.

In the context of the rest of the long-abandoned boat rehab mess I was facing at the time, new curtains were immediately assigned a "maybe someday" priority.

A long time passed. Then, a couple of years ago, I happened on a source for 1/4-inch fiberglass rods. I bought some rods, made some oak brackets and installed curtain rods at the tops and bottoms of the forward and aft cabin windows. After that, the project stalled. The curtain rods have been used mostly for towel racks. After the last cruise, however, it was decided the time had come for curtain work.

My wife Dia helped me select material. Dia doesn't sew--even buttons--but she has a great eye for colors, patterns and how decorative stuff works together. She is also good with coupons and getting deals at stores. My friend Paul's wife Erena, who is an accomplished interior designer, looked at my windows photos and measured drawings and helped estimate how many yards of fabric we should buy. She told me how to sew headers and rod pockets. She told me there is a difference between hems and seams. She said I should use Mercerized cotton thread.

I'm thinking: Hey, how hard can this be? We're only talking about six little windows. This will not be a Martha Stewart project. Sewing machines are not that complicated. I remember my mother helping me make a shirt for a Teddy bear with her sewing machine. I don't remember if she was sewing the shirt, or if I was at the controls. Nobody was hurt, as I recall.

My friend Major has a sewing machine he said I can use. Nevertheless, I am now thinking this might be more difficult than expected.

Perhaps the next thing I need to do is to cut some fabric. I hate to do that. The stuff looks so good on the roll. Scissors are unforgiving implements. Cuts are forever.

Dia says we should hire somebody to make the curtains. I am going to the library to get some sewing books. This job can wait awhile longer.

Driving off the edge of the Earth

South Carolina's Waccamaw River is an impressive stream where it joins flows with the Black, Pee Dee and Sampit Rivers to form Winyah Bay at Georgetown. It was a dark and cloudy morning last Tuesday when Ms. Bettencourt transited the Bay and headed upstream. The destination was Conway, SC, a little town located near the navigable end of the Waccamaw.

Like many minor rivers in the South and Southeast US, the Waccamaw served as highway for commerce from colonial times until the coming of the railroads. In the years before the Civil War, the river was lined, first with indigo, then rice plantations. Georgetown was a rich shipping nexus for agricultural riches coming from the interior. Today, there is still evidence of the rice culture along the Waccamaw. The structure in the photo below marks a rice irrigation canal on the western bank of the river a few miles upstream from Georgetown.

Almost all the rice plantations behind these canal gateways have reverted to marshland. Much of this area  is government protected, serving as wildfowl habitat and breeding grounds for ocean creatures, most notably shrimp.



Farther up the river, which still runs wide and holds channel depths from 20 to 30 feet, you'll find a few modern marinas serving housing communities. Houses and condos are often out of sight from the river behind low-lying cypress swamps. Then the river begins to narrow.

Major Sims photo

The tops of many of the larger cypress trees were shorn off by Hurricane Hugo, which swept through the area in 1989.








And the river continues to narrow. Lengthening shadows late in the day give the stream a somewhat ominous aspect.

Major Sims photo

I have been a longtime user of Claiborne Young's Cruising Guide to Coastal South Carolina and Georgia. We had a copy aboard Ms. Bettencourt. The first time I read the following admonition, it didn't really register.

Writing about the Upper Waccamaw, Young says: "Most of the route is uncharted, but it is well-marked and easy to follow if you watch out for various forks along the way."


Then rounding a slight bend, as the river continued to narrow, we learned the meaning of  "uncharted." It means that your chartplotter has no cartography. No soundings. Not even stream boundaries. We had driven off the edge of the Earth.

This screenshot from my Garmin 546s chartplotter shows part of our tracks to and from Conway. Before we made those tracks, there was just plain, empty green screen on the chartplotter. We were hurtling, blindly, at 6 knots through a solid green uncharted never-never land

And the river was getting narrower and loopier. And it was getting later in the day. And we had not seen a sunbeam since the previous week.

My friend Major claimed he was hearing dueling banjos. Then he started humming the theme from Gilligan's Island. "We may never get out of here," he said, clasping an unopened package of Oreo cookies to his chest. "When the food is all gone, these will cost you $8 each."

Of course we had the paper charts for the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. However, the Upper Waccamaw is not to be found there. But finally, as the river narrowed even more, we began to see day markers. They were widely spaced, but they were useful guides. Eventually we began to see houses. A little later we found the Conway City Marina and, an hour or so after that, a decent Philly steak sandwich just a few blocks down Elm Street.

An early departure the next morning came with just a little low lying fog and a hint of sunshine. Then the sun popped up, and we got a good look at all the sights that were just looming in the murk on the trip upstream. For example, the coffee color of the river water became evident in the wake.

The Waccamaw is one of several South Carolina rivers known as blackwater streams. The coloration comes from tannins leached from the cypress swamps.







Before long, and after getting lost in upper river loops only twice, we found the Lower Waccamaw. An outgoing tide, plus the river's current, moved Ms. Bettencourt at surprising speeds. At one point we clocked a GPS speed over the ground of  7.9 knots. That's fast for a boat with a calculated hull speed of 6.2 knots and a cruising speed closer to 5.5.

We were back at our space in Georgetown's Harborwalk Marina with plenty of daylight left before supper. Ms. Bettencourt was on her trailer at 9:30 the following morning, and back at her dock in the Savannah River at Augusta before 3 p.m.


Trip statistics

Our explorations out and back totaled about 75 nautical miles. We put 18.4 hours on the engine, which burned 12.5 gallons of diesel fuel. That works out to a burn rate of 0.68 gallons per hour.

The next voyage

 Destinations we talked about driving back included the Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles West of Key West Florida; Sanford, Florida, via Jacksonville and the St. Johns River, and the Gulf  Intracoastal waterway via Stuart, Florida, and the Okeechobee Waterway.

And, of course, we will be closely watching the diplomatic news, looking for any change of rules that might allow a call at the Port of  Havana.

Thunder, lightening, downpour, in Georgetown

...and it is dry and cozy inside Ms. Bettencourt!  My friend Major is convinced we are victims of some kind of cruiser's curse because it rains every time we leave town, today being no exception. He may be right.

We are at the Harborwalk Marina in Georgetown,SC, which is a very nice, recently renovated marine center with 30-amp 120 volt electricity for the space heater and high-speed wireless internet for the blog.

This will be a brief post because I want to spend some time "in this moment" enjoying dryness and warmth inside this 40-year-old boat.

It was just about 13 months ago, in another pounding rain, lodged on a mud flat near Beaufort, NC, with water pouring through the canvas camper top, that I declared "one wet cruise too many."

The outcome was more than a year on the hard for Ms. Bettencourt  while we built this wonderful new hardtop. It was definitely worth the work and expense.

Life is good. Dry is great.

Tomorrow is to be warmer and sunnier. We expect to be winding  northwesterly on the Waccamaw River. Reports will follow.

Before the wheels turn...

It's Saturday and we are planning to haul the boat out Monday morning and depart for what I am sure will be a delightful exploration of Georgetown, SC, and the Great Pee Dee, Black and Waccamaw Rivers. While some may think adventures like this just happen after you load  up and head on down the road, experienced cruisers know there is a usually complex infrastructure behind even a little trip like this one.

Here's a sampling of the kinds of answers we like to get before the wheels turn:

• What's the land route to the cruising destination?
• Are marina reservations in place?
• Weather forecast, tidal ranges, currents
• Where is the best public launching ramp?
• Ramp hours, fees?
• Where is secure storage available for the truck and trailer?
• Is there local land transportation--cabs, buses?
• Where are the restaurants, grocery stores, chandleries?

In addition, here are a few tasks that I never leave home without completing:

• Cruise itineraries for significant others and potential rescuers
• On the water chartplotter routes for the cruising area
• Testing operation, and checking/charging batteries for all the fixed and portable electronic gear
• Hands-on inspection of all safety gear

So I have been doing that kind of advance work today, in between trips to the dock to double check systems on the boat, load bedding, survey safety gear and so on. In the latter respect, I found my flares expired, so I went to West marine for a new supply.

At the end of the day, the tangible product in hand consists of confirmed reservations at one marina, A highway route to Georgetown, the location of a public launch ramp, the address and number of a U-Haul RV storage center near the ramp, telephone numbers for cab companies and a marina in another town we plan to visit, and cruise itineraries to leave with the home folks just in case. I have also done a few chartplotter routes to help avoid getting lost on the waters around Georgetown. Sounds anal. Might be.

Trailer update

We finished re-carpeting the trailer bunks in record time yesterday. Instead of the two-day job predicted, we  wrapped it up over at my friend Major's house in about four hours. Here are some results to compare to the trailer photos in the last blog post:

After removing the old carpet and staples from the top thirds of the bunks, I used a power planer to smooth the tops of the bunks and round off sharp edges. I think this will add some lifespan to the new carpet. This closeup shows the inward-leaning chamfer of the starboard bunk.












The photo below shows the 12-foot-long 1 x 3-inch treated lumber battens securing the carpet on either side of each bunk. Two-inch stainless steel deck screws, spaced about 12 inches apart pass through the battens and the carpet into the trailer bunks. After this cruise, I am going to make some sacrificial bunk covers out of cut up blue tarps to help protect the new carpet from ultraviolet degradation.

The truck and trailer are over at Major's house now. I'll be on the river in Ms. Bettencourt Monday morning, while he's driving the truck and trailer to the haulout ramp in North Augusta. We will stay in touch by VHF radio until we have visual contact at the ramp.

That's when all the planning and mechanical preparedness work will come together-- on the road to cruising destinations out of Georgetown, SC.