Puttering and Exploring


2009-12-13

I spent a couple hours at the dock getting to know Ripple, inventorying her lockers and checking out systems.  I think I found the problem with her electrical system (an ammeter, fried, with evidence of heat deformation on the back.  A loose lead from the shunt to the meter, as Dave Erskine suggested it might be.

I excavated the bitter end of both anchor rodes, and secured them.  Looked over the ballast in the bow, thinking about securing it as recommended in the survey.  The lazerette had a boarding ladder for recovering the deck after a fall overboard (another issue raised in the survey.   The forward-port jam cleat needs to be reset, a screw having stripped out).  The stantion life lines need to be resecured at each of their stern points, a nylon binding being more than half-way severed on each side.

As I was puttering, Bobby, a regular on the docks, showed me how to pivot the boat, end for end, in her berth, a simple manouever that will avert having to back in or out of the slip (duh).  Bobby's simple technique is going to get me on the water by myself a lot sooner!

The atmosphere in the boat was dry, and so also the bilges.

I stopped at the Fisheries Supply and purchased helmsman gloves, some shock cord, a new ammeter, new 12 gauge and hand held signal flares,  and nylon cord with which to repair the life lines.  Subsequently, I got a combination smoke alarm/carbon monoxide detector as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting a Chart Plotter, VHF, AIS Receiver and Tiller Pilot using the NMEA 0183 protocol

Image
NOTE: An updated version of this posting that includes an AIS transceiver is now available here. Ripple's complement of communication and navigational electronics now includes: Standard Horizon CP390i chart plotter  Digital Yacht AIS receiver   Raymarine ST2000  tiller pilot  Standard Horizon VHF/DSC radio These devices can all be networked, so installing them includes making decisions about whether and how to connect them.  As with most everything on a boat, there are tradeoffs.  The benefits of additional functionality are always at war with the unanticipated dangers of creeping elegance and the instability that arises from proliferating connections (natural failure points). My four devices, like most modern electronics, can talk to one another using the well-established NMEA 0183 protocol.  NMEA 0183 falls short of a full-blown network, but it meets the need for point-to-point connections such as are appropriate to my configuration.. ...
Read more

Re-powering s/v Ripple

Image
My Summer, 2017 Adventure An irregular sound, a vibration untuned to the sum of your experience: this one was a momentary drop in RPM... 25, maybe 50 rpm. I bumped the throttle, right? Then it happened again, and denial shades into anxiety. The opening hours of a 6 week cruise: Seattle, up the inside passage, over the top of Vancouver Island and a leisurely meandering through the inlets that indent the west side. But this journey ended just as it began. A series of intricate diagnostic rationalizations, fuel filter and impeller changes availed us not at all. Lots of oil gone missing! Limping into Kingston Harbor, Ripple’s Yanmar 1GM10 turned the last of some 300,000,000 revolutions in my service. Broken-hearted 1GM10 Only slowly did I surrender the hope of rebuilding my faithful one-lunger.  As it happens, Yanmar does not make an oversized piston for the engine, as they enlarged the size of the cylinder when the 1GM transitioned to the 1GM10, and given that...
Read more

Installing and Networking a Class B AIS Transceiver with a Chart Plotter and VHF Radio using NMEA 0183

Image
In 2015 I purchased an AIS receiver for a trip up the Inside Passage.  This posting is largely an upgrade of the  posting for that installation . I suspected at the time I might look back on purchasing only a receiver as a false economy, and that turned out to be the case. I want to be SEEN as well as to see others. This year  I purchased a Vesper XB 8000 AIS transceiver to replace the perfectly functional Digital Yacht AIS receiver that I had benefitted from over the previous three seasons.   My decision to go with Vesper was based on the reputation of their product and their customer service,  and also because the device makes the data on my network visible via a WiFi gateway.  This should make it easier to pull off tracking and route data, and to display AIS targets on tablet or phone as well as the chart plotter. The XB-8000 also provides an easily managed anchor alarm, accessible by tablet or smart phone.  I won't have to sit in the cockpit ...
Read more