Another day in Paradise and comments on emergency steering

2012-01-26 – Thursday

Another day dawns – patchy fog and overcast. The sun breaks through occasionally and it actually feels like it is warmer than the 53 degrees the marine weather guy is reporting. It is a wonderful day to be on the boat!

I awoke to hear the fan for the refrigerator condenser motor running full time. The evaporator plates in the icebox enclosure are room temperature. Drat! Anders, at Swedish Marine, says he will be back in this area mid-week next week and will look at it then. If I knew that the condenser was OK, I would just go ahead and strip the unit out of the boat and sell it. I don’t want refrigeration on the boat while I’m out cruising in Remotia. Repair people are hard to find and they are expensive.

I’m bouncing back and forth between boat projects and answering calls and emails about jobs. With all this activity, it seems like something ought to happen but I’ve been here before and it all evaporates like fog on a sunny morning. At the moment, I’m talking about positions in Alameda, San Jose, City of Industry and Hillsboro. Most of the recruiters sound like they are Indian (from India) and have heavy accents. It makes it difficult to know what is going on. I mostly have to make excuses for a poor phone connection and ask them to email the information. On top of that, my WiFi connection here in the marina is intermittent. It can take as long as 10 minutes to get an email sent after I finish writing it.

So, anyhow, I got the binnacle mount compass off the steering pedestal without doing any noticeable damage. Now I am trying to uninstall the pedestal guard. At this point, the cockpit has degenerated into chaos.

So far, I’ve done nothing that I can’t undo with a little work. I want to sail the boat using the emergency tiller to make sure that it isn’t so heavy on the helm that I have to have wheel steering. I doubt it – but better to check it out first.

At noon, the temperature is in the sixties and the sun is shining. Fragments of the coastal stratus drift across the ridge between here and the ocean.

Quite picturesque and comfortable. If it were just a bit warmer and I had a hammock, I would be napping on the foredeck. Someday…

Later...

OK – the following is slightly technical but hopefully not so boring as to cause you to fall asleep and fall off your chair. That could hurt!

I've been mucking about in the cockpit and the lockers most of today. The sun is now below the yardarm (somewhere) and it is time to reflect on the day's activities and imbibe some form of relaxant. Today it is a Merlot.

Somewhere I read that it is a really good thing to do emergency steering drills every now and then. For the non-sailors, this is a drill where you pretend that the steering wheel doesn't work and you have to go back to a more primitive form of steering known as a tiller - a stick that is attached to the rudder in a way that lets the driver keep the boat pointed in the desired direction. Interestingly enough, this recommendation comes from Edson, the manufacturer of the wheel steering system.

The first step is to go through the drill in the security of your slip. You know, make sure you have all of the pieces and you know how they fit together. The next step is to try it out while sailing. The first time should be under controlled circumstances - fully crewed, a full-time lookout, lots of sea room and light boating traffic. Then you can graduate to having random members of your crew declare an emergency steering drill at random intervals not to exceed once/quarter.

That's roughly what it said. Being the obediant, safety concious sailor that I am, I resolved to do that. It gets a little tricky since I usually sail single-handed but I figured I might entice a friend or two to come along and help me out. (Do I hear any voluteers out there?)

OK - Step one. Dig through cubbies and lockers looking for the key to take the cover off the emergency tiller access port. The Previous Owner (PO) had actually labelled it and put it in the storage area under the navigator's table. I took it out to the cockpit and found that despite all the bare-handed maneuvers I could come up with, the cover would not budge. Possibly, this has happened before and would explain why the key is bent. After generous applications of WD40, some gentle tapping around the perimeter of the cover and on the key handle, the cover began to turn. The key was only slightly more bent than it was before. Being the logical, safety concious sailor that I am, I took this occasion to clean out the grunge that had accumulated in the opening and in the threads on both part of the port and the cover.

Now to try out the emergency tiller. It has been living at the bottom of the port cockpit locker which is about a mile deep and full of stuff that would take an hour or two to remove in an emergency situation. No biggie. I excavated it and started to fit it into place.

But wait, I couldn't get it in place. That big shiny steering wheel was in the way. Not a big problem - the boss nut that holds it on the shaft is only finger tight. I unscrewed it, pulled off the wheel and listened to one of the tiny parts fall to the cockpit sole. Incredibly enough, it did not disappear down one of the cockpit drain.

Now the tiller fits over the top of the rudder post and begins to slide into place - until it clangs against the pedestal guard. Yep, fully seated, the tiller cannot be centered without grinding it against the top of the guard. (See the photo at the beginning of the post. The guard is the shiny, inverted, U shaped piece in front of the steering wheel.) Possibly the emergency tiller should be installed pointing toward the the back of the boat? I guess that would be more natural for sailors who are used to steering wheels rather than tillers but it is backwards for me - a sailor used to using a tiller.

Some of you may be aware that I am trying to sell off the components of my wheel steering. (Yes, you are not alone in thinking that this is weird and possible a desecration of the boat - but hey, it's my boat and my trip). So naturally this a good time to remove the pedestal guard. Now, this may sound trivial but it ended up taking several hours. I will say, that having looked into the guts of the Edson steering, I am impressed by how robust it is. I also am driven to wonder how many boat owners actually follow Edson's recommendations concerning lubricating the chain annually. Hint, you have to remove the binnacle compass to do it. That's enough to make many boat owners quail. Given the amount of grunge around the seat of the binnacle mount, I doubt that it has been done in recent history on Laelia.

Anyhow, I did finally get the pedestal guard, drop leaf table and drink holder uninstalled. The result looks something like this. The tiller is that big bent post behind the white pedestal. 

The binnacle compass is sitting on the navigator's table. I don't think I have broken anything yet - just in case I decide not to uninstall the whole system. Now the emergency tiller fits into place and isn't intefered with at any point in its travel from stop to stop.

But wait! Curiously enough, the tiller does not go equally far in both directions. When I push the helm to starboard, it deflects about 30 degrees before hitting the stop. Push it to port and it goes almost 45 degrees. I reinstalled the wheel long enough to verify that the rudder was centered (according to the piece of tape that I use to tell me when the rudder is centered) and then reinstalled the tiller. Hmmm. It is pretty close to centered. Why would this be? Possibly, I am wrong about where the tiller points when the rudder is centered? Tomorrow I will go out for a little excursion to find out a) when is the rudder centered and b) do I really want to convert to tiller steering.

Stay tuned...