It was cold and windy on the river but that didn't dampen our enthusiasm. We followed a large trawler-type vessel all the way tom East Haddam where he had to stop and wait for the swing bridge to open. Not us. We slid under with a foot or two to spare.
There were very few boats on the river, probably because of the cool weather. To save some money, we ran at 2100 rpm which gave us about 10 mph. An outgoing tide gave another one mph lift. That's a very economical speed for us and we were in no hurry.
We passed through Essex all by ourselves.
We assume that those yellow markers are for the sailboat races. Never have seen those before.
Then it was Old Saybrook, where we looked for our friend Dave's sailboat. We think we saw it but with that many boats, who knows?
We exited Old Saybrook light into a Sound that we rarely see. Despite forecasts of wind from the south at 5 to 10 kts and seas of 2 to 3 ft., the Sound was actually glassy smooth. Visibility was more than 10 miles. We turned east and thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
Over the last two years, we've been fighting a stubborn ignition failure in our starboard engine. No more.
Frances had to shoot on picture of the tachs. If that bad starboard engine was ever going to fail, it would have done so by now.
All in all, a great day to be on the water.
When we see the Mohegan Sun, We know we're almost home.
We docked with a minimum of drama and lots of old friends ready to take a line.
Now we can begin summer!
But first, we had to take care of a couple if small issues, which we did on Sunday.
In a previous posting of this blog, we described weak water flow from our SureFlo fresh water pump. We said that we'd order a new diaphragm and drive assembly for it and we did, although we were surprised to find them only at West Marine at an eye-popping $125. This is just a $200 pump, after all.
Anyhow, we installed the new parts following SureFlo's directions Easy enough, although we noticed that the diaphragm assembly was very different from the old one. We guess the new diaphragm assembly is a product improvement because once installed it worked fine. Perhaps a little too "fine." The first time we turned it on, we got more than adequate water and when we shut off the faucet in the galley, one of the hose fittings near the pump let go with quite a bang. We repaired that and next time we tried it, a fitting at the accumulator tank let go. Seems this new pump was operating at a pressure way beyond the 50 psi. that SureFlo says it is set for.
We managed to figure this out without SureFlo's help. To install the new parts, it is necessary to remove the pressure switch from the front of the pump. Four screws is all it takes. When reassembling the pump, we noticed a fifth screw that we had not been required to remove. It wasn't tight, so we tightened it, like all the others. Bad move.
On closer examination, we found that the fifth screw is used to set the pump cut-off pressure. Tightened down, that little pump was shutting off at something we'd estimate to be about 100 psi. Once we backed that screw out to about where it was, our water pressure was reduced to something more sensible and we had water from our on-board tank.
Our other issue was with the hydraulic steering. We rebuilt the upper helm two years ago and it has always worked perfectly. Coming from Portland to Norwich is weekend, we noticed that the steering had gotten sloppy and at the entrance to New London it stopped working completely. We could steer quite effectively using the engines and did so all the way up the Thames River and into our dock.
Today we took a look at the hydraulic steering system and found this short hydraulic line that had worn through from many years of contact with the arm that connects the two rudders. Someone, years ago, saw that contact point and wrapped electrical tape around the contact arm to at least slow the wear on the hydraulic line. It would have been easier to simply reroute the hose, something that could have been done with something as simple as a cable tie.
It's hard to see the pinhole that was leaking, but that's all it took. Some day, we'll find and correct every last thing the previous owner did to this boat in the name of laziness and/or stupidity.
Now we're off to find someone who can make up a replacement hydraulic hose.
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