Our first night – and first drip…..

After a gorgeous day bringing our boat up to Maine from Massachusetts, with a crew of 5, we were safely at our dock and the crew had all departed. We were officially alone on our boat for the first time. After a celebratory dinner and fancy desert out (the kids were at Nana’s, we had to take advantage of our kid-free night!) we return to the boat to start our life as live-aboards.

Life didn’t wait long to throw us right into depths of sailboat maintenance. I had dropped Ben off to use the bathroom (more on our on-board head situation later) and returned to the boat myself. Only a few minutes after lying down in bed to read did I hear every boat owners favorite sound. Drip……drip……drip.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the drip, it was pretty obviously coming from the engine room. This was the first (of I’m sure many) time I was thankful we did buy a center cockpit boat, and therefore have oodles of access to our engine room. I opened up both sides and found that it was the prop shaft that was steadily dripping.

Ben returned to find me on my hands and knees in the galley, head halfway into the engine room, with a light shinning on the prop shaft.

We allowed ourselves a moment of panic – ‘Are we going to sink our boat our first solo night aboard?’ and then we dove in to finding and fixing the problem.

As things tend to do (especially when you don’t know what you are doing) things got worse before they got better.

Seeing a hose clamp on the prop shaft, we figured tightening it was what needed to happen, it must not have been tightened enough. Simple enough, so we thought.

We knew where the socket wrenches were kept and dug them out and found the right size. I had barely attached the wrench to the nut when water started gushing out of the prop shaft.

What?

I tried again with the same results. Every time I touched the hose clamp water would gush into the bilge.

Okay, so maybe we were going to sink our boat on our first night after all….

Not knowing what else to do, we swallowed our pride and called the previous owner, who had just left the boat in our capable(?) hands a few hours before after helping us transport her from Massachusetts to Maine.

He explained to us how a drip-less stuffing box is put together, two ceramic washers, one that spins and one that doesn’t, and that sometimes if something gets stuck between the two, then it can drip.

We were momentarily amused that our first bit of boat repair involved a drip from something that had ‘drip-less’ in its name……

After emptying the bilge from the water that had already dripped (or gushed as it may be) the best solution was to run the engine at idle and put it in gear. This would spin the prop and hopefully dislodge whatever was stuck between the two washers.

The other option was to keep letting water gush into the bilge by manipulating the rubber gasket. We quickly decided that not filling our boat with water was our preferred first method to try.

After thanking the previous owner for his help, we turned the engine on and let it run for 10 minutes at idle speed but in gear to spin the prop.

We checked the prop shaft a few times while it was running, and it was now slinging water around the engine room. Great.

After shutting off the engine we checked again, and while the shaft itself was still a bit damp (from all that water slinging) it didn’t seem to be dripping anymore. Sure enough, not another drop fell from the prop shaft.

So no, we were not in fact going to sink our boat on our first night alone aboard.

Thank Neptune for that!