Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
posted to rec.boats.cruising
|
|||
|
|||
Whole lotta shakin' goin' on, revisited - Part 5...
Whole lotta shakin' goin' on, revisited - Part 5...
When we left you, we'd arrived at Fernandina Beach, parked outside of the paper plant. I'm guessing that they have done some air quality work since the last time we were here 5 years ago, as we've not really smelled it, other than the faintest whiff while were 3 miles away. The next day, we moved to be closer to the anchorage, and connected our WiFi to the public dock station. Our new in-laws, Ralph and Darlene Roellig drove down and met us for supper, and on a couple of other days, we explored the town. As always, a book swap is like a traveling library for cruisers, and the local coffee shop where we stopped had one! Of course, in our limited space, we have to take out books whenever we gain more, so we donated several more than we took, having read a great deal since the last such opportunity. On the way in to town, as is our custom, we stopped at neighboring boats both to introduce ourselves and to offer to take garbage bags to the bins. There we met Phil and Madie, whose boat we saw making a trip to the dock, and back out to the anchorage. While they had no garbage, they invited us for sundowners. We enjoyed each others' company, so made arrangements to go to the Farmers' Market the next morning. While Madie and Lydia shopped, Phil and I talked shop, about his troubled outboard. Walking through it with him, it seemed as though his problem was electrical. Sure enough, as we worked through his engine later, it proved to be his safety disconnect switch. Enough fiddling with it, and it was fixed; the engine ran reliably. Chuffed with our diagnosis, we invited them for dinner that night. All went well until the time for them to depart. Their dinghy was GONE! While it was pitch black, being well after cruisers' midnight, we still jumped in our dinghy to see if we could find it. What with the current and the wind, we felt it likely went off into the marshes upstream from were we were, but gave up shortly later in impossible-to-see conditions, even with a big spotlight. However, after we delivered them back to their boat and announcements were made to the general public, the coast guard, and the local sherrif, they hailed a passing fisherman early the next morning, asking him to have a lookout as he went up the river. Sure enough, when he returned, he'd spotted it, and Phil and I were able to retrieve it from up a small creek in the marsh. Once out, it started reliably and all was well. Time and time again we prove that we are blessed; all of our excitements have come to good end, and always while we're at anchor. While we were in Fernandina, we were hailed by a friend we'd met in the workyard in Ft. Pierce. He'd been gone and returned from the Bahamas in the time it took for us to get launched and up here, and had met some mutual friends in the Bahamas. Coincidentally, they came into Fernandina Beach while we were anchoring near the mooring field, so they came over to Steve's boat, Slow Flight for another set of sundowners with Jo, who'd sold the boat we knew, and bought another. We continue to find people who we've not seen for years, in the most unlikely (not that the originals were any more likely!) places, and pick right up as though it were yesterday. They were both headed out the next day, so we didn't get to spend any more time with them on this trip, but Phil and Madie and we headed upriver to Cumberland Island. We've wanted to go to the island on our prior trips past, but there was always some schedule preventing, so we jumped at the chance. Cumberland Island is a US National Park and Marine Forest, a gift of the Carnegie family. It's entirely primitive other than there are toilets, electricity and running water at a few locations for the wilderness campers, the museum and Rangers' offices and maintenance buildings. No trash barrels, no place to buy souvenirs, or any of the other ways to spoil wilderness, the island is entirely wild other than for the Greyfield Hotel (a 7 room B&B with its own ferry service to St. Marys Ga), and the remaining life-estate homes of the descendants from the time when Dungeness, the Carnegie mansion, was operating early in the 1900s. Otherwise, it's 20+ miles long, interspersed with hiking trails, and the opportunity to see lots of wildlife up close and personal as, of course, hunting isn't permitted on the island. We had two separate encounters with one of the herds of wild horses, a 5-feet-away extended encounter with an adolescent doe, many turkeys, and even an alligator. We spent a week exploring and marveling at how they must have lived with their 300 servants and other employees. If you get the chance, take the ferry from St. Marys GA over for the day, or if you're wilderness campers, for camping; you will love it. After our week in Cumberland Sound, we motored (no wind, again) down the sound and up the St. Marys River to an anchorage off the marsh, on the Florida side of the river, the GA side being chock-a-block with crab pot bouys, and further in, very deep channel of the river (no longer marked above the main street in St. Marys, Osborne Street, in any of the charts, electronic or paper, that we had - and we later learned in talking with other cruisers that it's that way with everyone). Once on the hook again, in a 5-knot reversing tidal current, we started in to deal with some issues which had come up in this passage, but had not (as has been the case in every instance of the many things addressed in this shakedown) needed attention until we were at anchor. If you've been following this shakedown saga (very little sailing, lots of waiting for parts and then making repairs/rebuilding), you know that we've met and solved lots of challenges. However, the trip up to Fernandina was motorsailing or plain motoring, the longest we've done for years, about 40 hours, total, and coming to St. Marys added a few more. We've also been searching, casually, for about 5 years, for new crush washers for the pressure pump on our Perkins 4-154, because we had a very small leak at one of the fuel line banjo bolts (banjo bolts being how fuel is carried from a hole in a device, connected to a fuel line on, typically, an injector or a pump; leaks are prevented with washers intended to crush to seal). It's no longer small, and close inspection disclosed another leak point. So, investigation intensified, and, eventually, we did indeed isolate the proper parts. In the interim, while we got to that point, I worked on getting the banjo bolt loose, it having resisted turning at a level at which I was afraid to apply more force for fear of breaking it. We did find them, courtesy of Bruce McCampbell, a very old (well, we've known each other for 10 or more years, and he was of great assistance in our recent refit, having his boat in the same yard as well) friend who had a mechanic he felt knew everything there was to know about rebuilding pressure pumps. I'll save you that saga other than to say he was right, and new washers were on their way quickly. By the time we got them I'd managed to make the banjo bolt move, and I replaced the crush washers. No joy, it still leaked a great deal. In the short time we'd been in St. Marys, however, we'd met a variety of cruisers and residents; they universally recommended a local mechanic who was able to come to the boat the next day. Again, saving you the saga, after many different things were tried, we replaced the steel crush washers with copper washers, which he had on his truck, and that joint was sound again. However, the rebuilder had felt all along that the pump would need to be rebuilt (details omitted here for the squeamish), and suggested that my tightening the bolts on another part which leaked through a paper-gasketed seal would be fruitless. It required dropping the starter, but I did it anyway, as I could hardly lose to do so. Sure enough, it didn't stop the leak, but it did slow it down. We'll have to see if we feel comfortable in continuing like that, or if we need to immediately return to S. FL to have him do the replacement and/or rebuild (I'd think he'd install an off-the-shelf rebuild and then rebuild ours in his leisure - but I'm also reasonably certain that he can do this in his sleep, the reason we'd make the trip back to him rather than trust someone whose "chops" we've not seen demonstrated). However, in our usual sailing mode, the engine nearly never runs, and, it doesn't leak when it runs, as well as, per my and the mechanic's opinions, runs like a top, the leak excepted, so we may try to salvage some of this summer before we're once again chasing the warm weather south. In addition, for reasons we've yet to determine, our Frigoboat refrigeration system isn't doing the job. Part of it was the new gasketing I put on (after removing the gasketing we did in the yard - *that* regasketing had been done while we were moored in Vero Beach) on small portions of the area being sealed, the swing of the doors not making the configuration I'd used work well), but we believe we must either have some moisture in the system, or some sort of blockage which comes and goes. At this writing, it's not yet been solved, and I've enlisted the US distributor of this system to help me diagnose and cure the problem. So, here we are in historic, scenic St. Marys GA, just down the road from the Kings Bay submarine base, home of the largest part of the US nuclear armory, and a bunch of submarines and support vessels and aircraft. We got to see some of that on the way in from the ocean on our passage (part 4), and again while we were anchored off Cumberland Island. We've started to explore the area and meet people, but that will have to wait until the next installment. So, until next time, Stay Tuned! L8R Skip -- Morgan 461 #2 SV Flying Pig KI4MPC See our galleries at www.justpickone.org/skip/gallery ! Follow us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheFlyingPigLog and/or http://groups.google.com/group/flyingpiglog When a man comes to like a sea life, he is not fit to live on land. - Dr. Samuel Johnson |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|