Seattle to SF - Part 4

8/16 – Day 5

[Long and fairly boring post about our boat's electrical system]

Page down a couple of times to skip excruciating detail and get back to cruising and food...

...and the electrical problems continue. At about 5:00 this morning, I was woken up by the sound of the engine RPMs falling sharply and then starting to race. Everyone came bolting out of their berths to try and figure out what was going on. It was Art's watch when the problem started – the tachometer RPMs had suddenly gone way down, and to get them up into a normal range (2200) on the meter he'd opened the throttle. The RPMs on the tac looked right at this point, but the engine was clearly turning faster than that, as our speed through the water was ~8 knots, when normally it would be somewhere around six. Since we had adjusted the clamp on the throttle cable yesterday, our initial thought was that maybe it had worked itself loose and was allowing the cable to slip, but that didn't really jibe with how the engine was sounding. For some reason, I thought to check the voltage on the engine battery -- yikes, 5 volts. That's not good (it should be slightly north of 12 volts). Obviously it wasn't getting a charge. However, we'd been motoring steadily since noon the previous day, so what on earth had sucked the charge out of it? Maybe the cockpit panel? That would explain why the tachometer had dropped – it wasn't that the engine was running more slowly, it was just that the tachometer didn't have enough poop (i.e. voltage, for you technical types) to push the needle over to the actual RPMs on the engine. But shouldn't the alternator be charging both the engine and house batteries? One would think so, but it was fairly evident that for some reason, it was not. We know for sure that the battery charger we use for shore power charges up the engine battery – if it didn't we'd have never gotten off the dock at Newport the previous day. So went go to fire up the genset, which can also power that charger, but, duh, it starts off of the same dead battery as the engine. Luckily, our electrical system is set up with two places to parallel the house batteries with the start battery, so we flipped one of those switches and got the genset and smart charger going with the house batteries. However, running the genset for the remainder of the trip was, in addition to making it insanely noisy down below when the main is running and only somewhat less bothersome when we're sailing, was going to have us going through diesel like Grant through Richmond, and so would have been pretty suboptimal.

Remember how a couple of days ago we “lost” our inverter? That was probably the first sign of this problem. The regulator can only send power to the start battery (via an echo charger, we're assuming – one of the upshots of this experience is that even after owning this boat for 11 years, we don't really know enough about our electrical system) if the house bank is over a certain voltage. However, it appears that when we switched from gel cells to AGMs about a year ago, we set the regulator too low, which meant a) we were taking a lot longer than we needed to to charge the house bank from the alternator, and b) we were never reaching the threshold where the echo charger kicks in to charge the start battery. When we had the inverter problem, we hadn't run the genset for a couple of days, so the start battery wasn't getting charged. We think the inverter (integral to the charger) saw the low voltage on the start battery when we turned it on, and started trying to up the voltage on the house batteries so that they would reach the threshold needed to charge the start batteries, or something like that. Obviously, you're not supposed to let your 12 volt starting battery get down to 5 volts. Hopefully, it wasn't that low for very long and will be able to hold a charge going forward.

Today, the lights on the regulator were back working again, presumably because by using the charger powered by the genset we'd gotten the house voltage high enough to charge the start battery. At least that's the theory. Not wanting to start fooling around with the voltage settings on the regulator at sea, we're just leaving the engine and start batteries in parallel any time we have the engine on – that way both banks charge at the same time. That's the theory, anyway, with much thanks to our crew Mitch, who knows enough about this stuff to both make an educated guess as to what the problem was and to figure out a way around it. That was just a wee bit too much in the excitement department before 9:00 AM. However, the cheese grits with bacon we had afterwards for a late breakfast were pretty awesome.

How did we not notice this charging issue in the year plus since we adjusted the regulator? Easy. We usually run the genset at least once or twice a day to charge the batteries, make hot water, etc. when we're at anchor. We'd also usually run the charger, not because we particularly needed to, but because diesel engines like to run under load. That was apparently plenty to keep the engine battery topped off. We'd also only have the cockpit panel live overnight, to run the anchor light. When we were at the dock, we had shore power running the charger, which also charges both battery banks. A extended period with a lot of things running off the cockpit panel and pretty minimal genset use was, we think, the only set of circumstances in which this could happen, and pretty well describes the last couple of days. I'm just glad it happened now – if we hadn't had Mitch aboard, it would have taken us a really long time to figure out what was going on, so that's the silver lining to this whole thing.

[/Long and fairly boring post about our boat's electrical system]

This afternoon, we had a dolphin show – for about 10 minutes, 4 of them were playing in our bow wave, crisscrossing under the boat amidships and just generally having fun with each other and our boat. I'd never thought of Arione as a piece of playground equipment, but they sure did. It was really cool. I tried to get a picture, but without going into video mode on the camera (which I didn't think at the time of doing) it was impossible to time a shot for when they were visible. If we get another show, I'll try shooting video and capturing stills from that.

We're expecting to be back in the Bay Area later this week (Wednesday, with any luck), and Art has already set it up with KKMI for Ron Romaine (who originally designed and installed most of our electrical system) to go through all things electrical and put it all to rights. Whew.

Meatloaf, fried potatoes and broccoli were dinner. Everything except the meatloaf (which we all agreed to save the leftovers of for sandwiches tomorrow ) got finished off.

Fried potatoes

1 can of whole small potatoes (you could obviously use new potatoes that you'd peeled and boiled, but the canned ones are good, and last almost indefinitely)
Butter for frying them
Salt
Pepper
Smoked paprika
Garlic granules (obviously fresh would be fine here too)

Drain the potatoes, sprinkle salt, pepper and garlic granules on them and toss them around. I do this right in the can to save a dish that will need washing later.
Heat the butter in a frying pan on high heat until it's almost smoking.
Dump in the seasoned potatoes and turn the heat down to medium.
You'll want to disturb them as little as possible. You want them nice and crusty, and if you move them around too much, they disintegrate and turn into hash browns, which are good, but presumably not what you're going for here.
When they look good and crusty (maybe 20 minutes total), sprinkle them with smoked paprika. I use maybe 1/2 a teaspoon per can.
Put a lid on the pot and turn off the heat. They will hold for a good 20 minutes.
Just before serving, flip them around with a spatula to more or less evenly distribute the paprika.
Eat.

Seattle to SF - Part deux

8/13–14: 235 nautical miles

Boy howdy did conditions change alter we rounded Cape Flattery. Seas kept building throughout the day, and by afternoon we had about a 7' swell from the northwest with 2-4' wind waves out of the south on top of that. This was, needless to say, miserable. Doing anything down below in these conditions was really difficult – and I have the bruises to prove it – at least on deck you can see what's coming. However, no one got seasick, and we saw a couple of humpback whales, which was really cool – we've seen greys before, but not humpbacks. However, after we stopped the engine to check the oil, belts etc., the inverter went berserk when we tried to start it up again. A bit of troubleshooting suggested that the problem is with the alternator regulator – all of the status LEDs were blank – and at least one should always be blinking (actually, we were wrong about that - see next post, it blinks when it's got current. If it doesn't have that, it can go completely dark. Who knew?). We'll have to get that checked out when we get to SF. In the meantime, we're going to have to run the genset any time we need more AC than our Radio Shack pocket inverter can provide. I broke out the pressure cooker and made a pork roast with apples. It came out really well. I have a feeling the pressure cooker is going to be very useful going forward – if for no other reason than that it's a pot with a lid that locks on.

Pork Roast with Apples

1 2-3 lb pork loin
2 large shallots, chopped fine (~ ½ of a cup)
1 ½ c. dried apples (you can also use fresh – up the quantity a bit and reduce the wine by about half)
1 T dried tarragon
1 ½ c. white wine
Olive oil
Salt and Pepper to taste

Sauté the shallots in olive oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker until soft and slightly brown. Set aside. Brown the pork on all sides. Pick the pork up, put the apples, shallots and tarragon on the bottom of the pan, and put the pork on top of them. Add the wine. Close the pressure cooker and bring it up to the low pressure setting. Adjust the heat to maintain it there, and cook for 40 minutes. Let the pressure cooker cool off of its own accord. Check the meat – it should be at or above (hopefully not too much above) 160°. Put the meat on a carving bord and tent it with foil while you puree the apples and shallots with a hand blender (or in a regular blender). Slice the pork. Spoon a pool of the resulting sauce on each plate and put the pork on it.



After a night of Mr Toad's wild ride in the forepeak, during which Art and I both got to experience weightlessness a few times, I started to prepare breakfast on day 3, only to find that a can of milk has spilled on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Everything on that shelf had to be taken out and cleaned. At least it wasn't the top shelf, I said to myself at the time. About an hour later, after taking everything out of the bottom of the fridge and wiping fridge and contents off, I had the eggs for breakfast all beaten and ready to go when the boat rolled and the bowl tipped and eight eggs spilled all over the counter and into the refrigerator through the edges of the lid. So now all of the shelves, including the one I just cleaned, were covered in oozing beaten egg slime. I was about ready to cry – in addition to being a huge mess of the morning, I lost 8 eggs – hopefully we'll be able to get more at our next stop (actually, the 8 eggs turned out to be no big deal, as I realized we have a lot of things other than eggs to eat for breakfast, so I'm mostly using them to bake). The second try at making scrambled eggs was actually successful – cooking while underway in fairly heavy seas is definitely a learning process. Conditions continued to deteriorate, and we decided to go into Newport, Oregon for some rest and showers – we have a shower aboard, but it was so rough it would have been a difficult proposition indeed to use it.

Tied up in Newport, took showers, and headed over to the Rogue brewery for some dinner (quite good). Unlike many harbors on the west coast, Newport has a practically no bar, and they are constantly dredging what bar they do have, so it was a pretty easy place to go in. The marina was still as a millpond, and we all got a good night's sleep.

Backward Compatibility Fail

When we were coming up with the list of upgrades we wanted to do for this trip, AIS was near the top. This is a system that "sees" other boats (the ones with AIS, anyway) and displays them on the plotter at the helm. It also broadcasts our information to other boats in the area with AIS receivers. It gives you not only the name and size of the boats it sees (so you know what you're looking for), but also speed and course (so you can tell if you're likely to run into eachother). With the right type of radio interfaced to it, it also allows you to direct dial the helm of any boat you can see on the screen. It is, in short, extremely useful, especially as we head down the coast.

The installation was straightforward, but getting it to talk to the plotter was not going well. In fact, it was not going at all. A little research that we should have done in the first place turned up the fascinating fact that our five year old plotter can't display AIS targets. Ugh - we need to buy a new plotter. Since the plotter is also our interface for the radar, we needed to make sure our existng radome (radar antenna) was compatible with the new plotter. I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that it was not. We wanted to go to a 10.4" plotter - one of the only things we've been sorry about from our previous big refit five years ago is that we cheaped out and went with a smaller screen on the plotter - but our existing radome would only work with the seven inch display.

We basically had two choices - one was a Frankenstein's monster approach of a mixed NavNet 1/NavNet 2 setup that had us installing the new plotter at the helm, the old one somewhere down below and having them share data. Oh, but they couldn't share charts over the network, just data - to have charts at the helm (sort of important, since that's where we drive the boat from), we'd need to buy new charts, which eliminated one of the potential cost savings of the monster approach. Did I mention that the new plotter uses SD chart cards, while the old one uses something else? I didn't think so. That's why we couldn't just go without charts in the plotter down below (making it a dedicated radar only unit) and move the chart cards we already own to the plotter in the cockpit. It would have saved us the cost of a new radome, but just looked like, well, something we could get working, but what if it died? Something told us this kludgey solution was going to be a ring-tailed bitch to troubleshoot down the line. Also - JFC, everyone who has dual helm stations has been buying two sets of chart cards? I had no idea.

So we gritted our teeth and went with option two: ripping everything out and installing a new system from end to end. That way we'd at least have the old complete system to sell, and we'd have a standard installation that anyone with access to the manuals could troubleshoot. Problem solved.

Well, no, problem not solved (this is a boat, it can't be that easy). To accommodate the new plotter and the helm VHF that we'd previously installed, we needed a wider instrument pod. Unfortunately, the wider pod was also taller. So tall, in fact, that it would have been sitting directly on the dome of our compass. It was also deeper, so it obstructed the view of the compass needle. Now we needed a smaller compass.

I think we've got something that will work, but honestly, I'm not going to believe anything until it's all hooked up and back together. Sometime later this week, we should have a new radar, plotter, instument installation at the helm and compass. Oh, and we'll have AIS. Hopefully.

Anyone want to buy a Furuno 1733C/NT radar/plotter with charts from the top of Vancouver Island to Acapulco? We've got a spare. It doesn't speak AIS, though.