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Marilyn

Adding a Holding Tank

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It was a major project to add a holding tank – it took about 4 months and touched so many areas of the boat. But it’s finally done, and I’m happy with the outcome.

Cleaning the Fuel Tank and Polishing the Diesel

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We pulled a sample of diesel from the bottom of the tank to learn about what’s going on down there. At first, the fuel looked pretty clean, but then we scraped the bottom of the tank with the sampling tube, and a bunch of gunk came up.

Cleaning the Heat Exchanger

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Rainshadow’s Perkins 4-108 diesel engine uses sea water (otherwise known as ‘raw water’) to cool the lube oil and engine coolant in a two-part heat exchanger. General lore is that you’re supposed to periodically remove the heat exchanger and clean the tubes that carry the sea water through the housings. Rainshadow’s heat exchanger had never been cleaned in all her long 35 years. So we decided to give it a go

Replacing the Lavac inlet hose spigot

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While working on replumbing the head, the inlet hose spigot snapped off inside the Lavac Zenith toilet. Yikes! It left a piece inside, so we were left with trying to figure out how to get that piece out, and what to do about replacing it. The Lavac toilet is just too nice to abandon over a little failure like this. I’m posting this here in case anyone else encounters this problem with their 35 year old plastic part snapping.

Up Up Up

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While Luke was home from university for spring break, we decided that with his help, it was time to send Van up the mast. We had some burned out light bulbs, and Van wanted to inspect the rigging up there.

First Solo Sail

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We’re having lovely late winter weather – sunny 50ish degree days, and a decent north wind, just like in summer (though its 20-30 F warmer then!)

So finally, after nearly 4 months of boat ownership, we took our boat out for a proper sail – alone.

Pulling Chainplates

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As Brion Toss said at this year’s Seattle Boat show, if your boat is more than 20 years old and has spent any time at all in warm climates, you have to pull those chain plates. So during that nice sunny spell we had recently, we did pull a few, and Brion was right – the chain plates need some TLC. To get to the punchline early, the ones we looked at are not ready to fail. But of course you want to know the whole long saga so keep reading.

Adding a Deck Access Port to the Propane Locker

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One of the things the pre-purchase survey turned up was that the propane locker did not meet ABYC standards, in part because it did not have access via the top of the locker. Instead, it had only side access, and difficult side access at that. So we decided to do something about it.

Remodeling the V Berth

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Here’s a great project that we think will really make a difference to our cruising enjoyment.

It all started with our efforts to figure out where to install a waste holding tank.