411: MORE THINGS BREAK: Life on the Hard Gets Worse!

This is life on the hard, peeing in a bucket, climbing ladders, working in challenging conditions, and doing things you never imagined so that you can get your boat back in the water as quickly as possible. Last week we made a dent in our list of projects, but also got the disappointing news that our starboard rudder needed to be replaced. This week we continue knocking projects off the list, but torrential downpours force us to deal with problems we never anticipated, Including depleted batteries. And yet another expensive, unexpected loss. The rain also delays several major projects, including the bottom paint and window replacement. But we refuse to let the weather stop us. Instead, we shift gears and tackle whatever we can, whenever we can. Which turns out to look a lot like two raccoons hopped up on speed. Alright! We'll get some internet! Oh, internet! Day six on the hard and we've got a massive tropical storm that is coming through the area. It stopped raining. It was raining really hard earlier. But we've got barely enough solar to keep the batteries charged up so we've made an extreme decision because they don't at the yard have any 110 plug-in and they don't have a jenny. So we shut the inverter down, the fridge is down, so we basically have very very little running on the batteries at this point. Actually we are solar charging now. We are taking the extreme. position to make sure that we don't lose our batteries which is inverter off no internet no fridge so i'm going to make a salad here to prepare for lunch and then we'll grill and yeah we'll just be incommunicado for the next 24 hours but that's what we got to do there goes brown bringing all of the food to the fridge and freezer in the office thankfully we have that The rain's just started again so it's a good thing we shut everything down. Still bringing in 85 watts and we are using very few watts so that's good. Getting a little sun. Thankfully the rain has stopped again temporarily. Fridges are both off now so we're really hoping to build up the power quickly and maybe every few hours we'll get a little bit of internet. We'll get some internet! Doing a little hatch clean, trying to figure out what is causing the leaks, whether it is the handles or whether it's the frame. I think it might be the handles, so maybe we can fix it. Using a little bit of silk glide after I've cleaned these to try and revive the gasket that's in there. There's a lot of paint coming off of the window in general, and I'm sure we probably need to just chip all the paint off and repaint it, but for now. Just to try and stop the leak and try and give a little bit new life to the gasket, we use Sil Glide and see what happens. We have a kerosene bath, spray, crystallized. As I worked in the boat, Brown and Allen worked on restoring and servicing our sail drive components at the work shed. One more there. Here we are, we're working on taking out the actual rings themselves. It costs us a little extra to have the sail drive serviced properly but it means we don't have leaks and can avoid another haul out. It's been two and a half years since we last had this done and we didn't have a single leak until now. Look how nice this looks versus this one has not been cleaned yet. They had like this German kind that they wanted you to use but I could never find it It was like really expensive, so let's get all Amazon. We are going to shorten the spring. Which goes inside of the seal to give it more body clamping power. Ladies and gentlemen this is advanced only on the blown away channel do you find. I'm starting to speak now. Crazy stuff like this you're just gonna like thread it back in there. And this will make it more effective because it clamps it tighter. Yep. I'm just putting a bit more tension on there. So this machinery and all these special little processes is why I'm not doing it because I don't want to screw it up and then have to haul the boat back out. I do all the easy, low-level grunt work and then let the experts take over. We're going to push that back in to seat both of these. He's one of the... Seals is facing out, the other is facing in. One keeps the oil in, one keeps the water out. We're having to bang this thing in there hitting different sides until it goes in easily. When you're out in the middle of nowhere you have to kind of make do with what you have and that's what we're doing. Changing it as you need to. We're very careful about that. Yeah, you really want to recover all that stuff. After a few hours of tedious cleaning and reassembling, the sail drive was ready for installation. Alan and Brown are working on getting the sail drive put back together and I am keeping an eye on our battery which is 81%. We should be good tonight and I will finish cleaning all the gaskets on our hatches. TV on the face and then bolt it in place and just tweak it down. Okay. And then let it sit there and then tomorrow morning take those bolts out, put Loctite on them, put them back in and tighten them up. Well, let's hope this is an indicator that this big storm system has passed us and we're through it. It's been raining all night again. Thankfully our battery is still good because all of our fridge and freezer food is in the main office. So we are just catching up on internet stuff because we had that off all night too. Maybe this means sunshine is here to stay. That would be good. This afternoon marks seven days here in the boatyard. There's not really a rush to get things done because we're still waiting for the materials for re-bedding our windows. Can't go anywhere until that stuff comes in and it's taking a lot longer than we thought it was and what they thought it was too. Customs wouldn't release the materials for some reason. They said this never happens but of course it did this time. The sun is out. We haven't seen sunshine in so long. Doesn't look like it's gonna last all that long but we'll take what we can get. We have not started out the day great. Our Dometic has decided to fail us. I'm jealous. So we have emptied it out fully. After bringing all of our stuff the day prior over to the office to go in the fridge we'll now have to bring some stuff back. We have tried to stuff the rest in our vitrofigo. A lot of it is finished, I should say, but most of it is not. So that's the start of today. The other fun thing that's happening is the captain. Wow, look at all that water. Captain is cleaning out our beautiful space that has been created because we got rid of our jenny. So that's awesome, but that is not fun work at all. It's just been one of those days. It's one more random thing not working today. It just seems like today's the day our wet vac isn't working. So unfortunately our wet vac has decided to stop working and our engine room is full of water because it rained cats and dogs yesterday and we've got a really bad split in our gasket. The small one? Yeah, the small one. This morning, I am going to drop our anchor because we were told that we have installed the anchor bar backwards, so anchor down! Good news! The sun is finally shining, maybe the system is over and we are going to install the starboard rudder today, the one that is not having problems. Bron's cleaning the delrin rings to reinstall the rudder. I've just noticed that both of the Delrin rings have Pretty big cracks in them but I'm gonna ask Alan if he thinks we can use them at least temporarily and get them replaced in Fiji. Got a bit of a sharp edge on that keyhole exit which is keeping the Delrin ring from going on smoothly. Here she is doing one of the things she does best and that's tie knots and basically if you can't tie a knot, tie a lot. That's what I do. She ties the right, the correct ones. So we're Tying this to the top of the rudder because then we can pull it through the hole and it makes the That's the... process a lot easier than it is if you're just trying to shove it up there without any indication as to where it's going. So that's what we're doing and it brings it up straight and I can help pull from the top which helps. So unfortunately the rain water has created a situation where we might We might have to dig a little bit of a hole. Nothing like digging ditches again. Wet ditches at the boat yard. We have become pretty good at dropping and installing our rudders after doing it so many times. Once we emptied the rainwater, in this case, and the mud out of the hole, the rest of the installation went without a hitch. Our neighbor on Kilo has just taken off. They're splashing today and we are so jealous. Oh man, it's gonna be another week probably for us. Brown's working on cleaning the tube. This is the tube that holds the rudder and prevents water from coming in the boat which allows you to drop the rudder if you need to if you have an issue without getting the engine compartment flooded. So key part of what we got in the engine room. Well every day I am now wet vacuuming. Our bilges, because we've got water in the bilges. I'm not sure where all the water is coming from, although over here I'm pretty confident it's that window. But on the other side, I don't know. That's a leak that we can't figure out. The good news is that we know it's fresh water. That's the benefit. I don't need to taste it. Anyway, when we get back in the water and have the time to figure it out, we'll have to look at our fittings on the top deck because that's probably where it's coming in. This window you can see the water damage here with the rippling. There's definitely a lot of water coming in through there going down the back of the wall. You can see all the mildew that's on the wall. Because of it. So that window is going to be changed out hopefully this week. It takes about a day to get used to everything in the boat being a complete disaster. Messy, gross, dirty. It just, you can't keep up with cleaning it. And there's really no reason to because it'll just get dirty as soon as you clean it again. One thing that I really miss is being able to just throw our bio materials overboard. Instead, we put them in a... Plastic bag which at the end of every day I take down to the trash and we do that because if we left it in the trash can here it would be pretty disgusting and we'd have bugs. So that's one thing that we do to prevent more issues with ants and things like that. Brown's ready to now caulk on the tube so we can get the other rudder in when we have the time. Next project in the mud pit. is changing the direction of the bar working in the best of conditions here a little bit of mud drip something dripping from somewhere last time we did this we had to take it off and put it on in the water it actually wasn't that hard but we were also anchored in about eight feet of water so it was super easy little anchorage too with the little crawfish we're looking on our little family members Batteries are almost at a hundred percent. We think the bad stormy weather is over. Tomorrow should be more sunshine So we're gonna take the risk and go bring our food back. We've got both fridges on. We're doing alright so far. 4000th time we've come down the stairs Just today Looking forward to it turning south and getting some chillier weather again Hello again. Hello. Well, it's kind of hard to believe how much our fridges actually hold a lot of stuff Alan, the owner of the boatyard, is on board. He's trying to diagnose the lack of revving on the starboard engine right now. These are the valves. Oh, those are the valves. That's all the valves. So it pumps fuel in and takes exhaust out. When you do the lash. You set it the first one to top dead center on this and then you loosen these off and as you loosen them You adjust the screw at the back here to give you tension on top of it. Okay Um, and then you measure it with a feeler gauge underneath the tank cover. Yeah, it's generally with older engines Uh, you do the valve lash quite often. It's quite quite an old thing, but Old-fashioned thing often a few injectors have to be changed. It depends on how much how clean the diesel is and Oh, okay. um It's generally not changing the whole injector as necessary. Generally the tips get carboned up, depends on how you've run the engine. That one, maybe that is your problem actually. You see that port there? Okay. Can you see how clear it is on top of that injector? Yes. And on top of that, that port for the pump. Yep. Now look at the other one there next to it. Oh wow. There's quite a bit of like rust. Oh, I hope that's the problem. If you look at how dirty it is. Right. So you shouldn't have, obviously with your filters and everything, you shouldn't have anything on this side. It might have choked up the injector valve. I'm not entirely sure why one port would have so much gunge in it. Like if you have changed the rake or the filters if it's getting filtered. The bottom of that rake hole looks pretty clean. Here it comes. Wow. Oh man. Ooooooh! yeah that uh that tip is carboned up and is that how how often do you say uh no so the part that we worried about is here okay this is just rust around the engine and stuff okay um i'm not too concerned about that i'm more concerned it's okay about that black carbon on the top okay So you definitely could. So when you have these rebuilt, they'll replace these nozzle tips? Right, that's the point. So they crack this and basically inside there is just a spring and a needle. Cool. And when the pressure comes in, it pushes the needle and opens it and allows the fuel to go in. All right, that can go in a ziplock as a spare. Wow, back to raining cats and dogs. Look at this. It's just one big mud puddle. All right, Brown's going up the mast today. We are changing out our flag line that is broken, and then he's just gonna do a quick check of all of our rigging and the track. The track always has screws that are popping out, so we're gonna get that done. Boat's gonna tip over when I'm up there. But then you'll just be placed gently into the bathroom right there, so you're all good. Oh, lovely, that's where I wanted to go anyway. They took the door off for you just so that it makes easy access. There's always a special bathroom story and drama at the boatyard. If it hasn't showed up, you know to wait for it because it's coming. Whoa, we're way up here. Take a look around. Wow. There's a balloon way down there, way off in the distance, and I'm just up here making sure the rigging's good, that there are no cracks, because we've got good ways to go to Fiji, and I'm lubricating the track, which is right here. I'm also making sure all the screws are in place, so that's what we're doing right now. Wish you could be up here. It's like a roller coaster ride if you get the adrenaline going when you get up this high. Wow we're finally getting this thing up. It's only been a month since we've been here. But, oh bird? Is that a bird? I don't know. Talk to it. Hey! Hey! Well our Tongan flag is finally flying and Brown did a great job cleaning out our new space that has no generator and now we're gonna get the, yay, no generator, no extra weight box in there. Except now we're gonna put some weight The ground is... working on filling the sail drives uh that's basically what the propeller is hooked up to it's the transmission that runs from the engine to the propeller this takes uh 15W-40 weight and i need 94 ounces in each one of them so i'm using this little bucket to measure all this here the ounces right here so that i don't overfill which is easy to do if you just do it straight from the bottle That's one of the many things that we're doing today. All right, well he does that. I am going up to sew the sail bag. The sail bag has completely come apart here, which is not good. Can't leave that until we get to Fiji. So I'm going to do a hack job by hand just to keep it closed so that it is not going to rip further. It's not pretty work but it'll last till Fiji, that's all that matters. Good news, the work on the bottom of our boat has started. The fridge just gave an error warning 34 which we looked up and it's the compressor is running too slowly so... I want to shake your hand, just tell you how proud I am of you. Took the whole thing apart, cleaned off the fan, cleaned off the coils, and now is the moment of truth. I give it about a 25% chance. Start your engine, start your refrigerator. But it's working! Maybe! How do you know it's fixed? Well, it's not clinking like it was. I cannot believe it. Well, I mean it has to cool down. We don't know if it's going to cool down. We cleaned the fan, cleaned it up and it's whirring away quietly and it's not hot like it was yesterday. Yeah, maybe the compressor hasn't even kicked in yet. She doesn't sound great, but she's running and no error messages yet. Nope, warning 34 again. While I worked on fixing the fridge, Alan was in the engine room changing our ball valve. Oh, that's the problem is that insert. That was the problem with the last one. Could you pass me the biggest socket out of the box? I don't know if you can see it, but this is definitely the downside of having your boat sanded. Oh, the bottom paint is all over the boat. Look at that. This well? Yeah. Got it? You sure? And we have not treated you kindly. I can help you throw it away. Just leave it down there for now. Well, you know it's a busy day when you only head down the ladder for the first time at 12.15. I've been down about a thousand times by now. Paul had been working all day sanding the bottom of the boat, so I wanted to check on his progress and also to ask if he found any issues, like blisters. Oh wow. So those are blisters. They're called, I think, small cysts. Small cysts. You can pop it. Okay. So how do I pop it? Did you just pop it? Yeah, only this part. Okay, so we pop, and then we epoxy, and then sand. And what happens if you leave it there? Yeah, it's getting big, big, big. Yeah, right, right, right. Bigger blisters. Where is it? Right there. Right. Wow that was a day of pretty significant loss with losing our Dometic and losing our wet vac but it's a beautiful sunset. We've had no rain today which is amazing and we have gotten a lot done. Alan came over and finished the installation of the fuel injectors And finished. The ball valve replacement. Boy, he can work a lot faster when we're not talking and asking him questions, but we're learning when we do. So that's a good thing. Our eighth day on the hard has been a successful one. It's good.