Friday May 24, 2024
Ketchikan is the land of cruise boats—or at least one of them. On our walk this morning we counted 5 cruise ships. The rain stopped and its a sunny overcast day. But whilst we are here it’s time for two more boat projects before we leave.
OK, this first boat project of the day is a crappy one no one really wants to talk about, but if you are a boater of any length I guarantee you have run across this issue. We discovered it the first time less than two weeks after we took possession of our boat in Cocoa Beach, Florida. In the middle of the night I kept hearing this sucking sound. It woke me up and I soon discovered that the toilet bowl water had drained out and the sucking sound was air flowing through the empty bowl. I filled the bowl with more water, but soon it was empty again. What to do? The answer was provided by our dock mate next door in a DeFever 47. I was bemoaning my problem and Kevin told me that it was easily solved with a bit of superlube around the rim of the closure valve. Turn off the fresh water pump, open the valve and YES put some super lube on your finger and run it around the rim. It works like a champ and lasts for somewhere between a month or more depending on use. Here is what you need to get.
The second project was to clean the engine and Genset sea strainers. I did this less than a month ago but I found from our cruise last summer that the algae buildup in Alaska is significant. I ended up cleaning the strainers almost every week. Here is what the engine strainer looked like before cleaning.
As you can see, not many twigs but lots of goo. The Genset strainer was even worse.
Clearly, we want our engines to stay cool and be able flow through the strainer with ease. So, word to the wise, be kind to your strainers and check them frequently, especially in Alaska. OK, time to get back in the bilge for one last look at the new float switch to make sure it is well set in place. Bye for now.
I would expect that if the sea strainers are that dirty your watermaker filters must be taking a beating as well. True?
Steve, the carbon pre filter does a good job of filtering out the algae, almost like a strainer. So far on this trip I have only run the water maker for a total of about 8 hours so the pre filter wasn’t that bad and the main filters are fine. I’ll let you how they look further into the trip.