My crew and I headed out for a practice sail the other day and half way out the engine started to loose power! Of course the tide was against us and we were directly under the Lions Gate Bridge... We opted to turn back and made it home without incident.

Over the past few months I had noticed that the engine was getting harder and harder to start when cold. I had assumed this was a result of cold weather and an old motor but with the engine loosing power whilst running there was clearly something wrong with the fuel system. When we got to shore I started exploring the fuel lines, trying to figure out what was causing the engine to slow down. I pulled the fuel filter apart and couldn't believe how much sludge it had collected - it looked like the filter had ingested a jellyfish! I know diesel filters are notorious for getting plugged but this filter was only a few months old. I suspect it may be time to polish the tank... that should be fun... I also pulled a cup of water out of the fuel water separator. Once the filter was replaced, with the water gone and the sludge removed the engine started easily and purred along happily. Hopefully there isn't too much sludge left in the tank as replacing this filter is a true pain in the ass! Since I was already wedged in to the engine compartment I opted to change the oil and clean out the water strainer at the same time.

I've recently discovered the therapeutic value of knitting, well as close to knitting as I'll ever get. I call it MAN KNITTING! I've been a splicing, soft shackle making machine! The great thing about soft shackles is that they are incredibly light, don't hurt as much when they hit you, and are as strong as the line that holds them. I suspect I will replace most of the shackles aboard my boat with these.

After literally two years of contemplation and procrastination this weekend I finally got around to installing the holding tank on Thursday's Child. I'm still not entirely clear why boats on the coast need to have these but mine finally does... Arrrrrrgh

The end...

It's so hard to motivate one's self to spend time maintaining your boat when it's sunny and windy and you'd rather be out on the water playing. I have had it in my head to re-build my cabin top winches since I bought the boat but have never actually made the time to do so... until now.

After a winch mishap, on an boat that shall remain un-named, that resulted in a friend being whisked off to the hospital in the coast guard hover-craft to have his wounds stitched up and kissed better, I managed to summon my much-repressed motivation and actually tackle the task. 

Greasing a winch that is well maintained is a relatively simple job and should only take a few minutes however, greasing a winch that has been ignored for a long time is really quite the process.

The cabin top winches had been neglected for long enough that it was very difficult to get the old grease off. In fact there was so much grease on the winch and it was so old that it had hardened and was effectively acting as glue... safe I'm sure! After much cursing and prying and grumbling I managed to get the winches apart. Inside I discovered each winch had broken pawls (The little flappie-things that click in to the teeth to prevent the winch from spinning backwards). I was clearly doing this service far too late!

Once I got the winches completely apart I attached them with a tooth brush and some degreaser. While this was a perfectly effective way to spending some time it really wasn't doing much to get the grease off of the winch. I opted to leave all of the components in a bucket of degreaser, go for a dock walk and watch other people work on their boat.

The degreaser worked very well. Miraculously I managed to keep all of the parts aboard and managed to get the winches back together with no "extra" parts left over. Once re-assembled I was shocked at how effortlessly they turned. I will certainly add this to my seasonal maintenance going forward!

I am incredibly frustrated to hear that, despite incredible public outcry, the Kits coast guard station was permanently closed today.  I've spent a good deal of time playing and working on the waters of English bay and I can tell you with certainty that this is going to cost lives. It really is as simple as that. At the Jericho Sailing Centre our much smaller rescue operation saves hundreds of lives a year. I was reminiscing with Jericho Sailing Centre GM Mike Cotter about how many rescues we have performed over the years. I know that by my last year at the JSCA I had personally pulled in well over 1000 people. To intimate that the demand for a local rescue response team isn't there is to akin to burring one's head in the sand. The Kits station is reportedly the busiest station in Canada.

One of the main justifications for closing the station was that the type of rescues they were performing weren't life saving operations. I would argue that is because the coastguard was able to arrive on site in a timely fashion whilst the situation was in it's infancy... a simple matter when left for any length of time can become fatal very easily!

One of the biggest concerns is the off season rescues. With fewer boaters on the water there are less people to respond to an emergency. The current plan calls for the off season rescues to be performed by the hovercraft which has a much bigger area of coverage and is grounded in heavy winds and seas... I guess they're also going to do something to ensure that rescues only happen on calm days when their one vessel is available?!

Recently the statement was made that more money was going to be put in to boat safety education to help mitigate the potential damage caused by the station closure... This strikes me as completely absurd unless they're going to teach people how to postpone having heart attacks and other medical emergencies whilst on the water.

I suppose I'm rambling... Ask me how I really feel... I dare you! :P

For the past year I've been somewhat concerned with the lifelines aboard Thursday's Child. Not because they look to be unsafe or worn but because they're covered in white PVC and are almost impossible to inspect. Most offshore regulations now stipulate that PVC covered life lines are not acceptable - Im sure there is a good reason for this.  Personally I've always been concerned about the enormity of the situation that could result if a lifeline failed! If we ever got out in any wind we could easily have up to 6 guys hiking off of the lifelines. One man over board is a nightmare but if a lifeline went it could be up to 6! That would really suck!

After a particularly productive evening of surfing the 'net and watching sailing videos I came across this and decided it was time to have the lines replaced. Steve White of Steve White Rigging (How'd he come up with that name?) was all to happy to come down and help out! Even more excitingly he was pretty cheap!

Today is a day of deep contemplation... I have to figure out how to most effectively deal with excrement as effluent from boats has to be eliminated as of last year!

Yes that's right Thursday's Child will now be sailing with a holding tank. I can't even begin to tell you how unexcited I am about the prospect of sailing around with the crew excrement sloshing around in what looks to be an overgrown Tupperware container with a pump attached. On the bright side  - If every boat has to have one of these shit-boxes installed I suppose I won't have to be so trepedatious when jumping in to the water whilst in a small anchorage...

In the early 80s when Thursday's Child was originally built the electronics aboard a boat like her we incredibly simple no GPS or 12V outlets or fancy led lighting. If the 12v panel is any indication the boat really only came wired with lights and there was no option to expand. While the old panel had faithfully served it's purpose for quite a while I decided that it was time to replace it with something a little bigger and a little more suited to the 21st century incarnation of Thursday's Child. I wanted to be able to control the lights, sailing instruments, outlets, GPS, and any other additions independently. I also wanted breakers as opposed to fuses so that if something went wrong I didn't find myself desperately looking around for an appropriate sized fuse - a situation that was only likely to occur in the dark in rough weather...  

I opted to go for a slightly customized BlueSea panel complete with breakers, lots of room for expansion, battery monitors and even an amp meter so i can see how much current the boat is drawing! Of course this wasn't as simple a task as i was hoping  - much of the wiring needed to be replaced as it was just a little too short to reach the new panel, and of course the original cabinet wasn't wide enough to accommodate the new panel. I suppose these things aren't really meant to be easy anyway. It took me a few days but it is all installed and working brilliantly! What's wrong with this picture!?

BRRRR - It's been really cold out and with no shore power there is no heater. As I'm already paying for shore power at the club (it's mandatory) I decided it was time to install a proper plug and breaker. Bob the local boat safety guru at VRC has been going on about these smart plugs - Apparently all the cool boats have them. A little research showed that they are actually a well thought out replacement for the traditional marine plug which is a design from the 30's!

As is with any boat project it is never as simple as simply installing one component. Installing a Smart Plug meant I needed to also install a proper marine breaker, a galvanic isolator and a GFI outlet for my heater. While I'm doing all this I might as well add a battery charger... what's one more component!?

Here's what I opted to get:

•     Smart Plug
•     Blue Sea 30a 110v Marine Breaker
•     Marinco Galvanic Isolator
•     Guest 12v charger with dual outputs (to charge the house and starter batteries)

All in all the installation was really easy. I opted to put the plug at the back of the cockpit under the tiller as it was the least intrusive place I could mount it. Ideally I would have liked to install it on the side of the cabin top near where the panel is but my boat has no interior liner which meant that there would be a very large plug protruding in to the cabin which could easily get knocked about and would certainly be unsightly.The only real pain was mounting the charger under the port quarter-birth as the area is really confined and I kept dropping the stupid nuts!

Lessons Learned:

1. DO NOT TO READ the Marine Electrical and Electronics bible by John C. Payne - While I'm certain there is loads of useful information in this book for other installations, in this instance he seriously over complicates what should be a really simple installation!
2. Despite the suggestion in the smart plug manual DO NOT use Vaseline to help get the rubber collar on the 30A cable. It made it almost impossible to pull the cable through... not unlike trying to hold on to a greased pig!

Thursday's Child came with some slightly older instruments including a Loran-C receiver. LORAN-C is a WWII era positioning system that uses radio beacons to help determine the position of the receiver. In recent years GPS has almost completely replaced LORAN-C and in Canada all of the radio beacons are being removed and the system has effectively come to an end.

I used to work at the Jericho Sailing Centre, one of the jobs I was tasked with was maintaining our rescue boat and most importantly the electronics aboard her. I quickly learned that the term "waterproof" was to a GPS what "unsinkable" was to the Titanic - a marketing gimmick and not a guarantee by any means. It was a miracle if we could get a GPS to last an entire season aboard Jericho Rescue - They would always get wet and stop working, we would return them under warranty and the manufacturer would inevitable try to avoid having to repair the units claiming they weren't designed for such exposed use. I often wondered what they were designed for but also knew trying to make a logical argument to an offshore technical support line  was a complete waste of time. After running through a series of manufacturers we installed a Standard Horizon and to the shock of everyone it lasted well over  a season and when it did eventually start to show signs of condensation under the glass screen it was repaired under warranty. Because of this I opted to replace the LORAN-C unit with a new fangled Standard Horizon CP300 chart plotter/GPS complete with external antenna and C-MAP charts. The Standard Horizon has a pretty standard list of features including NMEA connectivity which means it can talk to my wind instruments, VHF and any other marine electronics I fee like throwing in to the mix.

Installation was incredibly easy as I was mounting the GPS in the mobile instrument cluster where the LORAN-C unit used to be. I was able to use the LORAN-C antenna cable to pull the GPS antenna though the conduit and while I needed to make the hole slightly larger for the GPS I didn't need to move any of the other instruments around. I know I'm going to be much happier having a GPS and chartplotter aboard. There is nothing worse than pulling in to an anchorage having no idea what the topography looks like and desperately looking for a paper chart.