We have had problems with our dripless shaft seal since night one of owning Jelanea. You may remember that on our first night in Portland, ME, our stuffing box was dripping into the bilge. What a way to start boat ownership, with sea water making itself at home in your boat.

We were able to stop that drip fairly easily, by turning on the engine and putting the boat in gear we freed whatever was causing the drip.

Dripless stuffing boxes work by pushing a carbon stator against a stainless steel rotor the carbon plate is held in place by a rubber bellows that is compresed to create pressure.

Foreign material can get into the seal between the carbon and the rotor and create a leak. This is typically solved by either running the engine in gear, or flushing the system by hand compressing the bellows.

When ours started to leak while underway on Tuesday, we figured this was the issue and tried to flush the debris out. When it was fine for the next few days we figured we had fixed it.

But on Saturday we couldn’t get the water to stop flowing in, no matter what we did. After contacting our friends in Brio II and the manufacturer of our shaft seal, we decided that the bellows needed to be compressed more. They must have relaxed with age or been worked a bit loose over use.

In order to fix this we needed new set screws, that hold the rotor in place. As we were nowhere near civilization all day Saturday, we simply kept moving knowing the bilge was filling with water. Our bilge pump did a great job of keeping up and keeping our boat afloat.

We decided to stop in Belhaven, NC, mostly because there was a nearby hardware store.

Of course, since we arrived on Saturday evening, the hardware store wouldn’t reopen until Sunday at 1pm. As most other things in this small town were closed all day Sunday, we were glad the Hardware store was open at all.

I had gotten the correct screw dimensions from corresponding with PSS shaft seal, who manufactured our stuffing box.

Once we acquired the correct parts, we set to work fixing the problem.

Each rotor is typically set with 2 screws, and then an additional 2 screws are sink into the same holes to keep the bottom screws from working their way out.

I had thought we only had 1 set of screws I each hole and removed them with an Allen wrench. We had marked the prop shaft with a sharpie to know where the rotor started. Our goal was to push it aft 1/4 to 1/2 inch to compress the bellows and stop the constant influx of water.

After removing the 2 set screws both of us tried to push the rotor aft to no avail. There isn’t a lot of space to get at the prop shaft, but we pushed with everything we had. Our hands, our feet, nothing would make it move.

Finally I decided to double check that there weren’t a second set of screws still holding it on. Sure enough there were. I removed those ones and tried pushing again.

Still no movement.

I checked that there wasn’t a third set screw (there wasn’t). Not sure what else to do, Ben got a mallet and a spare board. He squeezed himself under the hot water heater and somehow found enough clearance to swing the mallet into the board which was laid against the rotor. A few good swings and it finally moved a little over 1/4 of an inch.

The dripping instantly stopped. We could see another sharpie line on the prop shaft, most likely indicating where the rotor should have been set.

Another problem solved!

We have been having trouble with our headsail since we got the boat.

Sometimes it worked just fine, and other times it was REALLY hard to pull out or to roll back in. We had a yankee cut sail on the roller furling, so its a pretty small sail that shouldn’t take a lot of power to unfurl or to furl back up.

Yet we kept having problems with it.

When we got back from our week long family trip we knew it was time to investigate. We broke out the bosun’s chair and up the mast I went.

Once I reached the top I saw the problem right away. The halyard for the fore-sail was sheared almost all of the way through. The cover was completely cut, and the core of the rope wasn’t far from failing.

The halyard had been wrapping around the fore-stay every time we tried to unfurl or roll in the sail. This chafing had eventually caused the rope to rip apart.

Views from the Top of the Mast

I helped the sail turn as it should, still at the top of the mast, so we could fully unfurl the sail in order to pull the sail down to the deck. Ben released the halyard and pulled the sail to the deck.

We had been wanting to try out the big genoa anyways, so we thought this was a good occasion to switch sails. First we had to fix or replace the halyard. Rather than going through the hassle and expense of replacing it I decided to try to create a new splice in the part of the line above the chafed part. There was just enough space left to do the splice we needed. After a lot of frustration with the fids (splicing tools) we have, and 3.5 hours, I finally got the splice done!

A Splicing Gallery

On Sunday, before heading out with some friends, we pulled up the big genoa. This sail is HUGE. Compared to our small Yankee sail, this sail is a monster.

We got it up and it looked like it was sitting right at the top. There is a metal piece where the halyard is attached to the top of the furler. The sail is attached to the bottom of this piece. The top is supposed to spin around the furler as the sail is pulled in or out to keep the halyard in one place, but allow the sail to spin around the furler. This metal piece catches on a black plastic cap to keep the halyard in place.

The problem when we had the Yankee up, is the black cap was set for the Genoa, not the Yankee, which is much smaller. So the metal piece was nowhere near the cap to keep the halyard from spinning with the sail.

Our first weekend out with the new Genoa went great, and the sail worked exactly as it should! We were psyched.

Now, as I write this, a week later, we are back to the drawing board. As we were out today we suddenly couldn’t pull the Genoa back in as we tried to tack.

One issue with how big the Genoa is, is that in order to tack around the staysail, we have to furl the Genoa in almost all the way as we tack. Except it would only furl in about 1/4 of the way before it stuck.

We aren’t sure what the problem is, but we ended up having to douse the Genoa to the deck since we couldn’t furl it in. So now we still have a problem, and a deck full of Genoa. The plan is to pull out the manual for the furler and see if we can figure out what is going on. Updates in a future post.

Then we plan to put the Yankee sail back up, after lowering the black cap to the appropriate height and hopefully we will have a fully functional headsail again.

With the boy away at camp for 10 days, we had a weekend with only 1 child to look after and entertain, so we decided to tackle a project we have been discussing for awhile now.

Fixing our leaky boat.

We know all boats have leaks, although we do remember the previous owners telling us that their boat was unique in that it was LEAK FREE! Maybe it was last time they were on-board during a storm, but it no longer is.

Three of our hatches leak from at least one corner, there is a leak behind the fridge in the cup/Tupperware cabinet and when Ben was washing down the deck some water came in above the chart table(not a good place for water, with ALL of our electronics located in or around the chart table.)

We haven’t figured out the source of the two deck leaks yet. The one on the port side (behind the fridge) only seemed to happen when we ran the deck hose. The one on the starboard side only seemed to happen when we were washing the deck – so each have only leaked once so far.

The hatches, on the other hand, leak every time it rains. We have been able to stem the leaks by putting the hatch covers on when it rains, but we wanted to actually solve the leaks.

We aren’t sure if the hatches are leaking through the seal between the lens and the frame, or between the frame and the cabin top. Origionally we were going to rebed the whole hatch, take it off the cabin-top and re-do the sealant. Except we couldn’t get the first hatch we tried to take off, off. The screws holding it down spun but didn’t come out at all.

So we decided to go with plan B, and re-bed the lens’ to see if that fixed the leaks. The sealant around the lens’ all had craks on the corners that were leaking, so there is a good chance that this is indeed the problem.

We spent all day Saturday removing the lens’ from the forward two hatches that leak, which was quite a process. We removed the screws, and then set to digging out all the old sealant around the lens’. This took ALL DAY. We mostly used flat-head screw-drives to do the sealant removal. We also used a utility knife to get between the lens and the bottom of the frame. Once we did this we were able to ‘pop’ the lens’ out of their frames.

Then we had to remove ALL of the old sealant from the frames and the lens’. We got both of them clean and ready by Sunday afternoon.

After taping off both hatch frames and the lens, to prevent the sealant from getting everywhere, we were ready to re-bed the first hatch.

We filled it with sealant, popped the lens in and……couldn’t find the screw holes to screw it down.

We had failed to ‘dry-fit’ the lens to make sure we had it lined up right before putting the sealant in.

Ben went down below and popped the lens out so we could turn it, and we took this opportunity to put more sealant in the frame, as it didn’t look like we had enough the first time. Then we spun the lens to what we hoped was the correct orientation, 90 degrees from where we had had it before, and tried again.

Still

No

Screw

Holes.

We were both beyond frustrated that we had missed the crucial step of dry-fitting.

Now we were back to square one, and decided we had to take the whole thing apart, remove all the sealant that was starting to get tacky, and start over again with this hatch.

I took a break and went to pick up Pizza for dinner with Trixie while Ben worked at removing all the brand new sealant from the lens and the frame.

He was just finishing up as we arrived back to the boat with dinner, and we took a break to feed ourselves and Trixie.

Side Note – doing projects like this with a toddler around is kind of like a circus show. She would be playing find by herself, then she would want to ‘help’ and typically this meant wanting whatever tool you were using (be it a utility blade, screw-driver or sponge) and would not accept a suitable replacement (a different screw-driver or different sponge.)

She would then ‘help’ for about a minute, and then declare that she needed help, with whatever she was helping with.

Then, during a crucial moment, when both of us needed to be concentrating on lining up the lens, she would suddenly have black sealant all over her, and one of us would take her down-below to clean her up before she made more of a mess.

We did a great job of making a royal mess of the boat all on our own – luckily the sealant washed off the deck fairly easily. As I write this 2 days later though, I still have spots on my hands and legs – it doesn’t come off skin quite as easily.

The second hatch went much smoother, we dry fit it first, and got it done in about 10 minutes. Of course by the time we were done it was dark, and we decided to leave the other hatch for another day, as the forecast didn’t show any rain for a few days.

We got the other one done a few days later and it went just as smoothly.

A successful project, with a bit of a rocky middle, but a good end product.

Update July 23rd: As I am finishing up this post as we are on day 2 of a lot of rain, and guess what – the hatches still leak. 🙁

So while we learned how to re-bed the lens of a hatch, we apparently didn’t fix the leaks we were trying to fix which means they are leaking somewhere else, probably between the hatch and the cabin-top.

We are able to stop the leaks by putting the hatch covers on the hatches, so we can keep the boat dry, but we’d ideally like to stop the leaks altogether.

Back to the drawing board…….

Today we spent the day up to our elbows in Jelanea’s electrical systems.

We learned a lot.

We learned how much we don’t know about boat electrical systems.

We learned how to remove, test, and replace a wire we thought was fried.(it wasn’t)

We learned that Ben can fit into the small ‘hanging’ locker beside the chart table (where we keep all our electrical stuff, and where a lot of the wiring for our boat is.

We learned what a relay is (kinda).

We learned that we would be okay getting by on just DC current, if we couldn’t get our AC panel working again. (The only things we plugged into AC were the coffee maker – but we can boil water on the stove an use a french press, and my computer, which I’m ordering a 12v charger for, and Ben’s phone, which he can charge at work)

And – we learned that we didn’t actually have the problem we thought we did and really everything was fine. Or something like that. Most things are working again – but we aren’t really sure what happened or how we fixed it, or if anything was broken to begin with….

We woke up with 3 problems, and we are ending the night with a completely different problem.

We woke up to pretty low batteries (69% charged), a solar charger with a frowny face (meaning it wasn’t charging our batteries) and an inverter that wouldn’t turn on (to make the ever important coffee.)

The batteries wouldn’t be a problem so much, if our marina was providing electricity – but as they are still building the marina, electricity is not yet available. So we are still depending on our batteries, and our solar panels ability to recharge them every day. If its not a sunny day we have been running the generator to recharge the batteries, trying to keep them in the 90% charged zone.

We both called out of work for the day, and got digging into our electrical system, that we knew nothing about.

At first we thought a wire might have fried when we tried to use the electric griddle on Sunday morning to make pancakes. The griddle turned on, drew a TON of amps, and then promptly shut off – after the pancakes had already been poured on (of course.)

The pancakes were saved by transferring them to the stove-top griddle. We then went for a 7 hour sail and had no use for the AC electrical panel during this time, and just assumed our solar panels were recharging the batteries on the beautiful sunny day. It wasn’t until Monday morning that we realized the solar panels were not charging the batteries, and probably hadn’t been all day Sunday, and it seemed something was wrong with the inverter as well.

We called a few electricians, when we felt we were in over our heads, but no one could make it out to us until Wednesday – we knew our batteries wouldn’t last that long, so we kept digging.

We removed the wire we thought might have been blown out, used YouTube to figure out how to test it, and learned it was actually just fine. So we replaced said wire (which we should have realized wasn’t the problem because it wasn’t attached to the inverter in any way shape or form.) While in the process of removing/re-installing this wire, we found a circuit breaker. It wasn’t tripped, but we reset it anyway. This didn’t seem to make any difference (but now we know there is a circuit breaker!)

Then we figured there was something wrong with the inverter unit itself, we pulled out our huge packet of instruction manuals and read up on anything electrical we could fine. The inverter, the solar charger, the battery monitor, etc. We found a on/off button on the inverter and tried the old ‘turn it off, turn it on’ trick, crossed our fingers and hoped. We were hopeful for a minute, because turning on the inverter now showed it producing 12 volts instead of 0, progress!

But when it didn’t go higher than 12 we were stumped.

So we moved onto the solar charger – if we could get the batteries to recharge from the solar we’d be in decent shape. We didn’t NEED to use AC current, we could get by running off DC if we could only recharge our batteries.

Checking on the solar charger again, and happy face! It was suddenly working again! Perhaps reseting the circuit breaker did this – we will never really know, but we were glad the solar panels were once again recharging our batteries. Two problems down (low batteries and no solar power.)

The inverter was still a problem, and calling the manufacturer resulted in a suggestion for a hard reset. Meaning disconnecting all the batteries at the battery terminals, waiting somewhere between 10 minutes and 48 hours, and then reconnecting to erase any memory the inverter had.

This sounded like a big project, way to much for how late it already was in the day – so we talked about shutting off the batteries for the night to see if that worked. Before we tried that I decided to call the previous owner to see if he had any insight into what might be wrong.

He did, and I’m shaking my head now at our naivete.

So in the engine compartment there is a light plugged into a AC outlet. This light is always on when the inverter is on, and lets you know that the inverter is working. Except the light wasn’t on, after talking to the owner I went to check and it wasn’t on. I turned on the inverter, and then tried the light, and nothing happened. Disappointed that it couldn’t be ‘that’ easy, I decided to try one more thing. I turned on the hot water heater, which pulls off the AC panel, and finally the volt meter jumped to 110 where it should be.

Our issue all along? We had the inverter on, but not the cabin outlets – so the let didn’t have power running to it at all – so it couldn’t pull the current and ‘wake-up’ the inverter.

Turns out our inverter has a ‘sleep’ mode, where it will drop down to a super low voltage if there is nothing asking it for power. The light in the engine room’s purpose was to create that constant ‘asking’ for power to display the correct voltage on the meter. But in order for it to ‘ask’ the cabin outlets also have to be on.

So was it really fine all day and it was just user error? Or was something wrong and in our digging around and futzing with things we somehow fixed it without knowing? We will never know the answer.

Unfortunately, our digging around into the electrical systems seems to have overloaded the battery monitor which suddenly stopped working. After the previous owner helped me find the fuse, I jiggled it a bit and the monitor is working again. The problem now is that the monitor assumes your batteries are at 100% when it turns on. When I jiggled the fuse and got it working again it showed our batteries at 100%. Yay! Wait – that doesn’t sound right.

So now we are in the situation of not knowing what level our batteries are at, so until we get electricity on the dock and can plug in for 24 hours and know that our batteries are full – we just have to hope we aren’t ruining them by running them too low.

And so ends a long day of digging through electrical stuff for really no reason at all, and creating a problem that didn’t need to be.

Ah – boat life.