Igniting the Cold Fires

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All right, all right, simmer down. Yes, I am guilty. Guilty of sloth, guilty of sleep, guilty of reading good books for hours at a time,  guilty of blog neglect. I admit it. Twenty lashes with a wet halyard. Contrary to what you may have been thinking, I’m not dead or critically injured. It’s just that the creative fire was kind of burned out for awhile, as in no little voice in my head talking to blog readers. Usually I’ve got a lot of goings on in the words department up in the little grey cells, playing with things I’d like to say on the blog. Lately, that has not been the case. I don’t like to force these issues but Mike was getting feedback at work to the tune of ‘How come you guys haven’t posted anything lately?’ and ‘Still no updates to the blog? What’s happening?”. Oh, the pressure! The PRESSURE!

A day to remember of Vancouver Island.

Maybe it has something to do with resentment. That’s right. I resent the fact that we sat out the entire fall sailing season with a broken exhaust pipe. We have no one to blame but ourselves, but whatever. The good weather is behind us, the darkness has descended along with the cold. The long nights of winter are almost upon us and we still have an uninsulated boat. Read: cold and damp feeling. Ugh.

Until recently I had not been down to the marina for well over a month. Yes, it’s time to get brutally honest here. I had not even visited Galapagos in that long. And the danger of not engaging with a boat for even that short amount of time is that I begin to forget. I forget how happy we are to have her, how much fun we had on her this summer, all the projects I should feel jazzed about doing. I forget all of that. My connection with her and with our future with her grows thin and delicate. This is pretty dangerous. Because when that happens, I am not focused at all on the goal of cruising in the future. I am just focused on the here and now. I needed a cure for my attitude.

Cool hand made dinghy in Bellingham.

This week the cure came in three ways.  First, I made myself go down to visit the boat and began to clean some of the stowage areas in preparation for insulating them (more about that in another post). Admittedly, I was not excited about the prospect of getting started on what will be a huge project. But when I climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit, I began to feel happiness! It was a noticeable thing, this happy and content feeling that came upon me as I climbed down into the salon. Galapagos seemed glad to see me, and I found myself patting her like a loyal companion and letting the joy seep into my cold bones. I wanted to just stand in the cabin and allow the feeling to sweep through me. We spent awhile together just hanging out before I started ripping the salon apart. My connection with her was back.

The second thing that happened is that I took a painting class. This has nothing to do with boating or sailing, but it’s something that I finally allowed myself to do just to enjoy the life I have right now, this very minute. It was awesome and now those creative fires are raging hot! Woo hoo! I love riding this kind of wave! If I have a goal with this, it’s to be able to enjoy some kind of art creation from the boat. We shall see if this is it. Who knows? And who cares? It’s just fun right now and that’s all I care about.

Just a fun doodle with paint. It’s like being back in kindergarten in the best way!

The third thing that happened is that Mike announced that after 18 years of being at Boeing, he finally has 4 weeks of paid vacation a year! Oh. My. GOD! What is this? Europe? By summer, if we are lucky, he will have 5 weeks to take for a sailing vacation. Oh, the places we could go with that amount of time! We can hardly stand it.

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Mike enjoying a happy day when the sun was shining and the weather was warm, not like now.

So all is well on the home front. The creative fires are stoked, and I feel more blog posts hanging out in the back regions of my brain.  I went down to Galapagos today to retie her lines and re-position the spring line in anticipation of tonight’s wind event, if it happens. I checked my progress in the insulation department, made sure breakers were off, cranked the bilge pumps a couple of times, gave her a little pat and moseyed on home. She’s ready to go with her shiny new exhaust pipe. Maybe we will get her out of her slip during the Christmas holidays. She’d like that. And so would we.

Merlin Gnatluster: Interweb Vigilante

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When we bought Galapagos last year, we were left with a number of items that we hoped to sell on Craigslist. One such item is the old transmission. I don’t know if you have priced a marine transmission lately but they can be really expensive and frankly I would be happy for any amount of money to have it out of my garage.

So on to Craigslist it went. And stayed. And Stayed. I’ve had a few nibbles but usually it just isn’t the right part. But then Joe came along. Joe really wanted to buy my transmission. He wanted this transmission so badly, that he didn’t haggle, didn’t ask any questions about it and possibly doesn’t know what a transmission is. In short, Joe is running a classic scam in which he offers to buy something for well over its asking price or, in Joe’s case, inadvertently sends more than the asking price and then requests that you send the balance back to him.

I sometimes find these scams a pleasant diversion. I was interested in Joe’s deal because he initiated contact via instant messaging and he wanted to send me a Money Order. As in through the mail. That seemed rather quaint and also a federal offense that can be investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspectors. It is unlikely that Joe is in this country but I bet some of his associates are and I am hopeful they will be having a chat with the authorities soon.

To create the right conditions for a fruitful relationship with a scammer, I have created an alter ego, Merlin Gnatluster.  Think of Merlin as that trusting and optimistic soul you wish  could exist in the world without being preyed upon. He always wants to do the right thing and he is extremely helpful. He wants to get to know people at a level that is uncommon in the digital world. Also Merlin wants this transaction to succeed as much as Joe does but sometimes he just doesn’t have all the tools he needs.

Below is a transcript from Merlin’s conversation with Joe. It is long so feel free to skim. Be sure to check out the “Money Gram” Joe mailed to Merlin.

In order to present the conversation in a readable format reminiscent of a chat session, I have used some CSS that may not render perfectly in older browsers. I have tested it in the latest versions of Chrome, Mozilla and Internet Explorer and it looks great. Older browsers, especially Internet Explorer may not work well.

My comments on the proceedings are in italics. Notice that there is an inner scroll bar just for the conversation.

I would like to provide attribution for some of the technology that permitted me to capture and present the conversation above:

OXSDaily.com on how to pull SMS messaging from the Iphone using SQL-Lite: http://osxdaily.com/2010/07/08/read-iphone-sms-backup/

Nicholas Gallagher’s CSS work to build Speech Bubbles: http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-speech-bubbles/

Exhaust System is a Go!

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Finally, after seven weeks of worry, googling and angst, we have our repaired exhaust riser installed in Galapagos.  Here is what we finally ended up with.

Exhaust riser 3.0. Now with more wiggle. Since this photo was taken, I have added an additional brace in the vertical plane.

You will note an eerie similarity to the first riser we had built in Astoria. The only difference is that we have added an eight inch long 2.5 inch wide flexible coupling as close to the exhuast manifold as was possible. The flexible coupling is a bellows type with a smooth liner inside to protect the bellows from exhaust particulates which hopefully will prolong its life.  I opted for a larger flex coupling in the hopes that it will provide some additional strength to the whole unit.  Sizing the coupling up came at the expense of requiring two stainless cones to fit the coupling to the existing pipe.

New Coupling with cones

New Coupling with cones

All of this is a departure from an earlier design that would have increased the diameter of the exhaust to 2 inches right after the manifold and added a flex coupling horizontally instead of vertically. I still like that idea and may design another system using threaded pipe to allow me to build yet another exhaust riser if this proves unreliable.

The design Steve Hulsizer and I came up with. I like the fact that it is sized up to two inches. The flex coupling would have to be fairly small (4 inches long?) to fit in the space available.

So why didn’t I just have the new riser designed like this? Mostly I was talked out of it by the welders who tended to agree that the existing design was actually quite robust in all areas and the only modification needed was the flex coupling to allow for engine movement without stressing the riser.  The existing system is quite beefy and at this point I can only hope they are right. Still I would like to have a new manifold flange made with a 1.5 inch NPT fitting welded on that would allow me to create my own riser using easily acquired stainless fittings and pipe. Broomfields, the local exhaust experts in the Puget Sound,  has a flex coupling with NPT fittings welded on that would be ideal for such a project.

As you may note, I am not done worrying over this part of our engine. Maybe it will just take some time with this layout to begin to feel that this is a safe and robust system. On Saturday, I added an additional brace to the riser and used what fiber glass heat tape I had left to wrap the majority of the pipe. I ran the engine for an hour at a variety of RPMs and everything looked great. In reality the engine moves very little except at dead idle. At 750 RPM, you can see the coupling moving perhaps a quarter of an inch. Since I know the engine moves most in this range, I tend to bump the speed up a bit as soon as I can and the vibration disappears quickly. Still, boats tend to spend a lot of time at idle, especially during docking maneuvers. When docking, I prefer to worry about crashing into expensive boats and would rather not have to split my time worrying over the engine.

Wrapped, braced and tested. I’m not sure how to wrap the flex coupling or if I even should.

Now that we have a functoning engine again, Let’s hope the weather will allow us to get out on the water a few more times. We are well and fully into fall here but we should have a few days here and there that will allow us enjoy a crisp autumn sail.