My wife Amanda often asks fellow cruisers the question: Would you prefer to sail with an experienced mechanic who knew little about sailing, or an experienced sailor who knew little about mechanics? As an experienced sailor, I think I’d go with the former. In the last 11 years of living onboard we’ve managed to keep Leventeia, a Beneteau Oceanis 43, moving with (very) basic technical skills.
Before I retired I was involved with heavy industry, improving the efficiency of maintenance systems. This was process work—I don’t have any experience of working on the tools. Generally speaking, maintenance was planned based on timing or milestones (for us an example would be engine hours), repairs were unexpected events prioritized on severity (e.g. being holed under the waterline), and improvements were made when inspiration struck (e.g. we realised we needed more fans).
In part two of this series, I will focus on boat repairs. I consider repairs as working on something after it has broken. Boat maintenance is a planned activity which, if you have the process right, really shouldn’t be postponed. Repairs, on the other hand, should be prioritized. We prioritize based on what is affecting the operation of the boat, what is affecting our comfort, and what should be done if we ever get around to it. We have our list of boat jobs—as most cruisers do—even though the categorization isn’t that formal as most jobs self-select without too much discussion.
My development from technical neophyte to almost-useful handyman has been guided by listening to more knowledgeable people, Nigel Calder’s Boatowners’ Mechanical and Electrical Manual, and watching YouTube videos. For boat maintenance, and fixing known problems, these resources are fantastic. But when repairs are required, my biggest problem is actually working out what is wrong. Boat repairs need the right knowledge and the right spare parts. Without the former, the latter is irrelevant.
Availability of spares is always an issue in the cruising grounds Amanda and I enjoy most. Last year we hauled out at Deltaville Yachting Centre on the Chesapeake Bay while we flew home for our first family Christmas in seven years. Amanda discovered Amazon Prime, and we bought parts for boat repairs that had disappeared from the list years ago. A replacement salt-water foot pump for the sink, new cockpit speakers to replace those I’d put my heel through years ago—plus many other non-essential repairs which we’d learnt to live with due to the lack of parts. These were all relatively simple replace or repair jobs which improved our comfort, but didn’t really affect the operation of Leventeia.
COMFORT REPAIRS
Toilets are an interesting combination of comfort and operational necessity. The manual forward heads had been leaking for a while. I’d tried making new gaskets, and although these were semi-effective, we realized we needed a whole new pump. It was pretty straightforward to find the part and order it. Job done.
A few months ago, the electric aft head stopped discharging from the bowl. I thought the problem was the motor, so comparing the manual with our unit, I ordered a new motor. Which, unfortunately, didn’t fit the housing. We finally found the right motor with the right housing, so we bought that online and had an operational unit once more. Until about a week ago when the bowl would not empty. Again. This time I thought it was a blockage in the discharge pipe. I removed the complete toilet so I could access the pipe, removed and cleaned it, and reassembled all the parts. Then found the blockage was still not cleared. My latest diagnosis is that the pipe between the toilet extraction and the holding tank is blocked. Perhaps. This is now a “comfort” task—I’m not sure what is wrong, but, and as the forward heads are working, I’ll look at the aft heads when other priorities permit.
URGENT REPAIRS
Other boat repairs can be readily diagnosed and quickly attended to. Most people would recognize a hole below the waterline as an urgent repair. We were anchored off the Nicaraguan coast in San Andres. This is a very shallow anchorage with poor holding and sudden storms. What could go wrong? A storm blew in, and the boat in front of us with a rope-only rode dragged down on us. In the ensuing chaos his rode wrapped around our rudder. We eventually untangled each other, and when things calmed down I dove on the rudder. The rope had sawed a 5cm hole through the rudder’s gel coat and foam to the metal frame. We carry a few sticks of Smart Aqua Epoxy Putty, a two-part tube which, when folded into itself, mixes the inner and outer tubes to affect the chemical hardening. There are many brands on the market, but we use Smart Aqua simply because it is widely available.
We have a Power Dive deck compressor. Sitting on the transom, I was able to work small pieces of the putty, then dive down and push the putty into the hole. I smoothed the surface as well as I could, then bound a plastic cover around the rudder to try to help maintain the repair’s shape while the putty cured. This seemed to work very well as, when we hauled out in Guatemala, we drained the rudder before a professional fiberglasser repaired the hole properly. Some water drained out, but certainly not as much as there would have been if we’d simply left the hole open to the sea.
The problem was pretty obvious, technical knowledge wasn’t needed, and we carried general kit to make good a repair. Another example of an urgent repair using whatever was available was when we were sailing east up the Gulf of Aden.
Off the coast of Yemen, the main started behaving oddly and we realized the gooseneck had come away from the mast. A small grub screw had unscrewed, and that had allowed the pin and washers to come loose and the fitting to fall away. We picked up all the parts on the deck, hoisted the boom with a spare halyard wrapped around its inboard end, and managed to reattach the gooseneck. Except we could not find one washer. We didn’t have a spare the right size, so I used two turns of stainless steel wire tightly wound around the pin. The two turns were almost the exact same width of the washer, and we were able to continue with this work-around for three years down the east coast of Africa until we reached Cape Town. But we kept a very, very close eye on the gooseneck.
Once again, the problem was straightforward and we knew what we had to do. But there are times when we see a problem but we have no idea what to do.
FAR FLUNG SPARES
Our water-maker started losing pressure when we were halfway across the South Atlantic. Relatively urgent, but not so easily diagnosed. Amanda found a crack in the end cap, which we identified from the manual and confirmed with Schenker in London. We had scheduled a stop at Ascension Island, where cruisers are usually limited to a stay of three days. We were allowed to extend our stay if we could get the parts from Schenker. A courier was not an option, and delivery by supply ship from Cape Town would have delayed us for months. This was in 2021 when Covid was decimating supply chains throughout the world.
Ascension’s police sergeant told us that the island’s lawyer was on holiday in London. She called, and he agreed to bring two caps if they reached him before he flew back to Ascension in 15 hours. Somehow Schenker UK were able to make up the order, their courier arrived as the lawyer was getting into his taxi for the airport, and the caps made it on the military flight to Ascension. Due to Covid, all personnel and luggage flying into Ascension had to quarantine for two weeks. Yet somehow our caps were “mislaid” at the airport. We were devastated when we heard the news. But the next day one of the administration staff turned up at the local bar with a parcel which had been “accidentally” left in the corridor outside quarantine. Using WhatsApp, Schenker UK instructed us on the fitting of the new caps so we could continue our journey to Surinam. We were very grateful to everyone involved at Ascension Island and Schenker.
GOLDEN ADVICE
Sometimes things happen which, to me, are inexplicable. When we were motoring down the narrow Connecticut River channel from Essex, all our depth and wind instruments went blank. We tried rebooting the nav system, but that made no difference. We knew our track was safe, so we reversed our course back to the anchorage. We are members of the Ocean Cruising Club. Their port officers around the world go out of their way to help blue-water sailors like Amanda and me. Bob is the OCC port officer in Essex (and also the President of the Salty Dawgs Association). We’d had a great time with he and his wife Brenda while we were in Essex. Although he couldn’t help diagnose, he introduced me to Newport Electronics.
They were extremely busy, but Cade made the time to talk me through the problem. He suggested I look at the NMEI and SeaTalk nodes to see if any were shorted, then replace any faulty nodes I found. He also recommended I check the 3amp fuse in the Raytheon CPU. I traced the lines and found the echo sounder transducer had a nasty black scorch mark at the NMEI connection. I also found the fuse had blown in the CPU. Changing the fuse and disconnecting the transducer brought the instruments back to life, but we still didn’t have any depth info. Being in the U.S., we were able to buy a replacement transducer, and lo and behold all was back to where it should have been. Despite being in the middle of the busiest season in the affluent northeast of the U.S., Cade did not charge a cent for his advice. Sometimes knowledge in the cruising community is about the generosity of who you know—thanks Bob and Cade.
For Amanda and me, boat repairs and priorities are an ongoing point of discussion. We have given up on achieving an empty jobs list. But we do enjoy a certain satisfaction when we fix something which has been alluding us. With the right knowledge, and the right spares or appropriate kit, we hope to keep sailing Leventeia for many more years.
