All the planning. All the preparation. And. Oof.

Here's the ladder. It's under this.

Day 16

The range light (fitting is a Perko 0170BMD) was out. The bulb was not connecting solidly. While hanging in my rock clumbing harness at the first spreader, I touched the bulb and it came on. When doing electrical work, I found that wiping with alcohol swabs is great for cleaning off some of the less conductive corrosion.

Tightened all the screws. It works. Original light bulb and everything. Okay then.

The gasket around the lens is shot. I plan to replace it with Perko Combination Light 0170BMD. This is the all-singing, all-dancing, all-LED version.

After failing yesterday, today, I finally punmped the bilge (almost) dry. What’s left requires a sponge.

Tasted it. The water was fresh. As in water tanks or rain. No oil or diesel residue.

Other jobs we did today:

• [x] another provisioning run
• [x] an engine test run
• [x] more varnish around hatch
• [x] deck wash (fwd half, up to the cockpit.)

Mr. Lehman

The engine ran flawlessly for 90 minutes again today.

He "runs rough" at about 1700-1800 RPM's. He did this yesterday, too. Talked to the folks at American Diesel, Kilmarnock, VA. Told them I'd replaced all the filters. Asked if it was still fuel? Injector pump? Injectors? Something else?

Their informed opinion is it's the injectors. An injector can have odd behaviors that are RPM-specific and random sounding. In this case, the "rough" idling, where I heard a clear -- and intermittent -- missing beat in the regular hum of the engine.

We have spare injectors. Diesel guys didn't even ask how old they were; they said to have the spares tested and rebuilt if needed. Tnis means it's time to schedule a mechanic pull the old injectors and have them refurbished.

The Bilge

We inspected every through-hull. The bilge is dusty dry. Dry everywhere except the deep bilge under the propellor shaft where there's standing water. Which I pumped out.

In spite of that, the bilge pump ran at about 19:00. Ugh. More searching will be required tomorrow.

Pumping it dry earlier today only revealed that there's definitely an active leak into the bilge.

Day 17

I applied Varnish around the main hatch.

CA washed the rest of the deck. It hasn't been this clean since we endureed Hurricane Sandy at anchor in a creek in North Carolina.

We spent some quality time pondering the bilge. We confirmed water is weeping from the mounting from the aft starboard through-hull. This through-hull is nigh on inaccessible under the companionway ladder.

We'd planned on stowing the truck over in the long-term vehicle section of the boatyard. And we'd planned on doing a final batch of laundry. None of that happened.

The Brick Wall

A through hull fitting is how water drains through the hull. There's a huge, bronze valve.

Here's the cabin sole in our bedroom (the aft cabin). To take this picture I had to remove the ladder.

You can (barely) see a big, bronze valve down there. It's dark green -- the copper develops a green patina. It's vaguely shiny because it's covered in waterproof grease.

At the top of the image, you can see the hole in the cabin sole. That's the hole in the picture above.

To the left, there's a handle. It's vertical. The valve is open. Rain water from the cockpit drains can run down here to exit the boat.

It's hard to see the shape of the bright green base. It's a flat disk of bronze. Underneath the green disk, you can kind of see a black rubber gasket poking out. Underneath the black rubber is a block of wood epoxied into the hull.

The bronze disk is bolted through the hull.

The brown stain running down to the bottom of the picture? That's a hint that water is running down from here into the deep bilge.

If a hose or hose clamp fails, you push the lever to close the valve. You have to figure out what to do with the water in the hose (it's a cockpit drain, after all) but at least you're not sinking.

If the fitting between valve and hull fails? Catastrophe.

Brick wall.

This isn't going to get better.

Sometimes, after being on the hard for 6 months, a boat changes shape slightly. When she's first splashed, some things weep until the wooden bits swell up and the other bits settle back to their preferred shapes.

It's been a week. We're still weeping water.

There are two parts to the repair.

The cabin sole

The tiny hole in the floor needs to be replaced with a properly removeable section of cabin sole. This is some skilled carpentry.

It's needed to get access to the handle on this through hull. It's also needed to rebed the through hull.

The through-hull fitting

The bronze through hull needs to be disassembled. It's held in place two ways:

There are bolts to be removed. This involves grinding the hull to locate the heads, buried in epoxy. The bolts haven't been touched since 1982. Likely it means grinding off the nuts here, and then pouding the bolts out.

There's a "mushroom head" that goes through the hull and screws into the massive valve. This needs to be unscrewed from the valve. There's actually a tool to help do this from outside the boat.

I'd really, really like to keep the massive bronze valve. The mushroom head is a $200 part. A replacement valve is probably $700 or more.

We think we've got a guy to do the through-hull work. We need to find a carpenter first, however. And. While we're talking about it, maybe we should get a mechanic to replace the injectors.

Not the winter vacation we'd planned. But. It's all good stuff that needs to be done.