Problems: Repairs and Monitoring

We never expected to have a trouble-free boating life, but we (naively) thought that we would have some respite from maintenance work after all the refurbishment work we did.  However, that has proved not to be the case.  I have been saying that I would blog about the maintenance and repairs we have been compelled to carry out since rounding Land’s End and so this blog entry will aim to do just that.  The following aspects are not listed in chronological order and cover some aspects of repair and others where we have decided to monitor for the time being until an opportunity presents itself for full repair.

 

The first issue I want to talk about is the stern tube assembly.  The stern tube is a tube through which the prop shaft spins, connecting the engine to the propeller (I know, Granny and Eggs spring to mind, but bear with me!)  Since this tube is underwater it clearly has to be sealed at either end to prevent the ingress of seawater whilst also allowing the prop shaft to spin freely.  There are various different styles of sealing methods used but all essentially rely on a packing material (in our case, rope) clamped around the shaft by a gland nut.

  The packing material is lubricated with grease which you pump into it via a brass pump.  Some gland nuts are designed to allow a small (drip) amount of water through to help keep the packing cool when the shaft is spinning.  By all accounts, as ours is a greased type, we shouldn’t have water coming through.  When we arrived in Milford I noticed that the bilge area around the stern gland had about a litre or so of seawater in it.  Up to this point this area had been dry.  I mopped out the water and thought that the gland nut needed adjusting.  I then pumped in more grease only to notice that the grease was oozing out from behind the gland nut assembly.

  This is not good news!  The stern tube should be screwed into the back of the assembly and therefore there are only two ways this grease could escape.  Either the tube is not screwed in (far enough or at all) or the tube itself has corroded through and become holed.  The only way to know for sure is to remove the prop shaft and the stern tube, but this can only be done with the boat out of the water.  Once again we find ourselves wondering why this issue hadn’t manifested itself before we had the boat lifted out at Gweek.  I have cleaned up the area, adjusted the gland nut and continue to monitor the situation, but this is only delaying the inevitable.  Thankfully there has been very little water coming in, and it only appears if we have had to push the engine hard, so I am hoping it will hold out until at least next spring.  We are facing another hefty bill to rectify this one, particularly if the stern tube needs to be replaced.  Oh the joys of wooden boat ownership!

 

The next issue I want to talk about is an ongoing saga with the toe rail and fairlead.  You may recall in a much earlier post that we had sustained damage to the toe rail when someone had put weights on our mooring lines when in Dartmouth.  I had carried out a temporary repair when we got to Mylor last year, but it was always going to be a weak spot.  Then when we were on the swinging mooring earlier this year the fairlead was ripped out again along with a large chunk of the toe rail.  A more permanent repair was going to be needed.  I managed to source a length of iroko from a timber merchant near the marina and decided that I would scarph in a new piece to restore the strength needed to support the fairlead.  This was easier said than done.  I cut the original toe rail aft of the second stanchion so that the new piece would be well supported and fitted a bracing piece on the inside to give the scarph joint sufficient strength.  The job is not particularly pretty and there are many carpenters out there who would have made a much better job of it than me, but I gave it a go.  Having replaced the fairlead I thought all was well.  However, I still wasn’t happy that this area would hold up under the strain of a mooring line.  I noticed that the toe rail was being twisted every time the mooring line was under tension.  It would only be a matter of time before it was damaged again, so a rethink was needed.

  I decided that it would be better if the fairlead was fastened directly to the deck rather than sitting on top of the toe rail.  This meant cutting the toe rail back from the stem head to leave a gap for the mooring lines to pass through.  This works much better, and doesn’t look too bad.
 
I just wish I had thought of that idea before doing the toe rail scarph as I could have kept the original toe rail and just cut out the damage.  Oh well, you live and learn!

Everyone says that owning a wooden boat means dealing with leaks, and that certainly seems to be true.  We also expect to have water collecting in the bilge which can be mopped or pumped out.  However, one particular leak is worth talking about.  We were regularly getting a fair amount of water collecting in the galley bilge and under the galley floor boards.  We had been advised to taste the water to see if it was salty, the theory being that you could eliminate fresh/rain water leaks rather than seawater leaks.  Sure enough, the water tasted salty and so we guessed that it was probably an underwater seam that was leaking when the boat was being bounced around.  When we had the boat out of the water at Gweek we thoroughly examined all of the underwater seams and found nothing amiss.  Perhaps it was one of the, now replaced, keel bolts that was the source of the leak.  However, we were still getting water collecting in this area.  There was no obvious sign of entry.  Sometimes there would be a lot of water and others there would be only a small amount, but it was frustrating me.  Then I realised that the presence of a large amount of water coincided with filling the water tanks.  Why hadn’t I noticed this before?  I lifted the saloon floorboards and watched as I filled the tanks.  Sure enough, there was a leak from the tank lid and one of the pipe connection flanges.  I ordered new seals and now we have a dry bilge.  I ask, why hadn’t I thought of this before.  I’ll tell you why.  I was misled by the notion that salty water could only be a seawater leak.  When you put fresh water into the bilge of a 55 year old wooden boat it soon becomes salty due to a build-up of years on the water.  The rule of thumb may be true in many cases, but it’s not always the case, and shouldn’t be used to misguide you from other potential causes.  Lesson learnt?  Possibly!

 

The last topic I’ll cover in this entry is the electrics.  This is a combination of repairs and an ongoing plan to make ourselves more self-sufficient.  As you know we like to spend nights at anchor away from marinas whenever we can.  There are two things most skippers worry about constantly.  One is fresh water (of which we know we can last about six days) and the other is electrical power.  I constantly live in fear that the engine will fail to start when needed due to a flat battery.  We have a total of six lead-acid batteries arranged into three separate banks.  One bank is for the electric windlass (the anchor winch), one bank is for the engine starter and the other one is for the domestic electrical loads.  Even though they are separated in theory by an automatic battery isolator I was increasingly getting the feeling that the engine start batteries were being drained by the domestic loads.  I know that, again in theory, I can charge the batteries from the 240v battery charger as long as I can start the engine.  But if the start batteries are flat I won’t be able to get the engine going.  I was also beginning to think that the engine alternator wasn’t functioning properly either.  What to do?  Firstly I replaced the engine batteries as one of them was definitely not holding its charge.  I have also replaced the alternator and wired this directly to the engine batteries so that it only charges them and not the domestic batteries.  This now gives me the confidence that my engine batteries are completely separate and unable to be discharged by the domestic loads.  I have realised that the automatic battery isolator needs to be replaced as this isn’t working correctly, so that’s next on the cards.  I can still charge the domestic batteries by running the engine which can power the 240v battery charger via a separate generator.  All of this is a good step forwards, but we’re far from self-sufficient.  We have a 100w solar panel on the wheelhouse roof which is giving some charge but not enough.  The biggest electrical draw we have whilst at anchor is the fridge, and this one panel is nowhere near capable of delivering the charge to the batteries to keep up.  We need to increase our solar charging capacity as much as possible.  Space is at a premium so I have yet to work out how best to solve this one – the research is ongoing as is the cost!

 

Ok, so a bit of a long-winded summary of a year or so of repairs.  There are other things, like continual leaks, things breaking, instruments not working properly, etc., but nothing unexpected.  Keeping up with the big stuff is bad enough.  Till next time……! 

Where Did The Summer Go?

Those of you who have been following my blog won’t be surprised to know that it has been quite a while since I last posted anything.  Somehow other things keep taking up my time and I find that yet another month has gone by without me hitting the keyboard.  Therefore I thought that I would write something like a summary of what we have been up to since arriving in Milford Haven back in May.  Hopefully this blog entry will give you a taste of what challenges have faced us, repairs we have done and what our plans are going forwards.

Our journey around Land’s End was our first (and to date only) major passage and we felt a great sense of achievement having safely arrived in Milford Marina.  We planned to stay a night in the marina to restock the boat and rest before taking up a swinging mooring at a boatyard further up the River Cleddau.  We ended up staying three nights as the wind picked up and we didn’t fancy trying to pick up a mooring buoy in difficult conditions.  It also occurred to us that getting on and off the boat from a mid-river swinging mooring in a fast flowing current without an outboard motor was going to be nigh on impossible (or at least reckless).  We had been talking about getting an outboard motor for a long time.  We toyed with the idea of electric outboards, second-hand engines or buying new.  We had been given the opportunity to try a Torqeedo electric outboard whilst we had been at Mylor and we were reasonably impressed with it.  However, charging the batteries would be a problem if we spent a lot of time away from shore power.  Second-hand petrol engines could be a minefield.  We might have been lucky and found a good one that had been looked after, but when you are relying on it for your safety I wasn’t willing to take the risk.  And so we found ourselves buying a new Mariner 4hp outboard motor and I have to say that I am very impressed with it so far.  We have used it many times over the past few months and it seems more than capable of ferrying us from boat to shore and it uses very little fuel (so I don’t feel as though we have compromised on our environmental credentials too much).

We left the marina to take up our swinging mooring which we had booked for a month in advance.  I have to say that we were less than impressed with the boatyard on this occasion.  It was only by chance that we spoke to them a couple of days before our arrival and mentioned that Wendy Woo weighs in at 20 tons.  They hadn’t thought to ask us and had told us we could use any mooring buoy on arrival.  However, having told them our weight they quickly changed that and told us to use one of the last two buoys on the river as these were the only ones rated for our weight.  Furthermore, when we arrived there had been no preparation of the buoy itself and we found that the pick-up buoy and mooring strop were completely twisted around the riser chain making it impossible to lift it over the bow.  Thankfully a member of the boatyard team happened to pass by in a RIB and helped us untangle the lines and moor up safely.  Lessons learnt: always mention the weight of your boat when booking a mooring and don’t assume that the mooring buoy will be easy to attach to.  In hindsight we could have tried lassoing the buoy to make the initial attachment and then sorted it out later, but we hadn’t had much practice on mooring buoys at this stage.

Our month on the mooring buoy presented a number of challenges.  The river current at this point is particularly strong on spring tides.  Getting on and off the boat usually involved us getting wet and we were glad that we had bought the outboard motor as rowing against the current would have been very difficult.  Resupplying the boat usually took two or three return trips.  We broke up our time on the mooring by visiting family.  This meant that we also had to get Lily (our cat) on and off the boat.  She coped remarkably well with the ordeal, probably better than I did!  Our main challenge however, was riding out a Force 9 storm that came straight at us for nearly 24 hours.  The mooring itself was sheltered from all directions except the South-West and yes, you guessed it, that was where the storm came from.  We spent a sleepless night on board hoping that our mooring lines would hold us.

We had placed extra lines out to give some assurance but then you just have to sit there and be ready to act if it all goes wrong.  Thankfully our lines held, but the toe rail repair I had carried out was ripped out, and this time the fairlead ended up in Davy Jones’ locker.  Thankfully this was the only damage sustained.  Not so for one of the other yachts on the moorings as we could only watch helplessly as the wind managed to unfurl their headsail and rip it to shreds.

Once our month on the swinging mooring was up we prepared for leaving.  Our plan was to try and spend 5-6 days at anchor before having a night in a marina for a ‘shore shower redemption’ and replenishment before leaving again.  However, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.  In this case the enemy was the weather which, for most of the summer, has been fickle to say the least.  So, although we did manage several stints at anchor we were anxious that we had somewhere to go to if the weather changed for the worse.  Another ‘enemy’ was Covid-19.  Rumours were rife that Wales might have been heading for another lockdown and this might have meant that we would not be allowed into any marinas as visitors.  I spoke with Milford Marina on several occasions about the potential for problems with lockdowns.  We had our names down for a winter berthing package and they said that there ‘shouldn’t’ be a problem if the Welsh Government announced another lockdown but this didn’t fully allay our concerns.  Thankfully we were able to persuade them to allocate us an annual berth in the marina and so we find ourselves with a place we can call ‘home’ if lockdowns do continue.

Living in a marina is not what we really had planned.  However, it is serving a purpose for the time being.  It has allowed friends and family to come and visit us and the location of Milford Marina is ideal for access to some great sailing grounds.  Milford Haven Waterway is pretty well sheltered from the worst of the weather.  Yes, you have to dodge large oil and gas tankers, and the oil refineries don’t present the best backdrop for photographs, but other than that it is a great location for exploring further afield.  Having said that, our adventures have been curtailed somewhat by the aforementioned fickle weather.  Several times we have done all the passage planning to head for Tenby, Fishguard and further up the Welsh coastline only to be thwarted by strong winds and/or rough seas.  Perhaps bolder sailors than us would have pressed on regardless, but we want to enjoy sailing rather than endure it.  We have managed to complete a few trips and a couple of them are worthy of specific mention.

The first passage we did we were aiming for Fishguard.  This entails passing through both Jack Sound and Ramsey Sound, and you have to get the tide timings spot on otherwise you can get stuck in violent tidal races.  You have to pass through the sounds at slack water and you have an hour and a half to get from one to the other.  We arrived at Jack Sound, which separates Skomer Island from the mainland, exactly on time and we passed through without incident, although the water looked as though it was boiling.  However, having got into St Bride’s Bay the wind dropped and, if we were to make it to Ramsey Sound on time, we would have had to motor all the way.  We decided that, rather than push on we would explore St Bride’s Bay instead and look to anchor for the night.  St Bride’s Bay holds a special place in our hearts.  For many years we brought our boys to the beaches along the bay where we camped and messed around in the sea.  Newgale, Solva, Broad Haven, Little Haven, have all borne witness to our family trips.  Approaching these places now from the sea gave a whole new perspective.  We approached Newgale first and then tacked our way south to eventually drop anchor off Little Haven.  We stayed for the night looking at the lights in the village and remembering good times.

 

The following morning dawned with fog all around us.  We knew that a northerly force 7 was due by the end of the day so we had to find a more sheltered anchorage.  We knew of a small bay in the neck of Skomer Island that would give us shelter so we headed off in the fog to go back around the island, this time taking the seaward side.  The chart showed turbulent water close to the island and the almanac recommends keeping two miles off.  I thought that I had given the island a wide enough berth, but no.  I underestimated the distance and we got caught in the Wild Goose Race to the west of Skomer Island.  The tidal current was flowing very fast and the water was all over the place.  I pushed the engine hard and, although we were doing 7 knots through the water we were only just making headway.  I steered us further off shore in the hope of finding calmer water and once again Wendy Woo looked after us.  We made it safely to the anchorage, but not without given ourselves a fright!

The fright was worth it though.  We got ourselves close in to the anchorage and stayed there for two nights listening to the wind howl over the top of the island.  And we were treated to the sight of thousands of puffins and guillemots flying around and diving into the water.  There was also a family of seals swimming in amongst the rocks and basking in the sunshine.  We will never tire of seeing such amazing creatures.

 

The second of our passages saw us making our way eastwards to Tenby.  The Bristol Channel is a very tidal waterway with strong currents either helping or hindering progress.  We planned our passage to make best use of the east going flood tide which meant that we would need to be at St Ann’s Head for around 9am.  We left our berth in the marina and headed out to St Ann’s Head as planned and we were all ready to turn south-east when the range safety patrol boat approached us.  This stretch of coastline is home to several military ranges: Castlemartin, Manorbier, Penally, to name a few.  We made radio contact with the range and we were told that we needed to keep 3 miles west and 4 miles south of Linney Head (it could have been worse, they can send you 12 miles south!)  So we altered our course plan to comply.  There wasn’t much wind and the water was smooth so we resigned ourselves to a slow motor-sail along the Bristol Channel, hoping to keep the favourable tide for most of the journey.  As we approached St Gowan Shoal cardinal buoy we were joined by a pod of dolphins, the first we had seen close to the boat.  They frolicked and played at our bow for about 20 minutes, rolling over to look up at us.  This was a truly magical moment.

We felt totally blessed by this gift from the natural world, but also outraged at the amount of rubbish we could see floating along the tideline in the Channel.  It encouraged us to do even more to reduce the amount of packaging we consume in our daily lives, as clearly recycling schemes don’t always work!  The rest of our journey to Tenby passed without incident and we anchored of the North Beach for a couple of nights in blistering heat.  The beach and town were packed with holiday makers and we were so glad that we had our own bit of space to relax in.

 

The remainder of our time this summer has been a mixture of frustrated passage planning and spending as many nights as possible at anchor away from the marina.  We had hoped to travel north as far as Liverpool, but each time we planned it the weather changed and frustrated our efforts.  We have had to accept that this is now part of next year’s plan to get as far as the west coast of Scotland.  Dale has become a favourite anchorage for us.  It has good shelter and holding, and there is easy access ashore using a seasonal pontoon.  This has enabled us to walk a good chunk of the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path as well as giving us inspiration for art and writing.

 

How well has Wendy Woo stood up?  In my next blog I will detail the problems we have encountered, repairs we have done, and what we plan next in order to keep her in good shape.  Till then, stay safe.