Yep, the complete disassembly of the toilet!The head over a period of months was having a harder and harder time pumping out. Finally it stopped flushing, so no other alternative other than taking it completely apart to find out the mystery of the marine head.I've never taken one apart or seen one taken apart, so this was completely new territory. I removed the intake and discharge hoses (yuck), and rubber-banded a plastic bag over the discharge side since it went directly into the holding tank. Then unbolted the head from the floor and took it outside into the cockpit for further disassembly.Once completely taken apart, the problem become apparent. There's a rocker valve that pushes a float ball up to seal the air into the toilet that allowed the pump to go from pulling water into the bowl to sealing it and pumping water out. The rocker had a set screw that had come loose, which allowed the rocker to slip. Hence the whole discharge function stopped functioning!OK, $80 worth of parts from Groco later and I was ready to reassemble. (As a brief aside: the Groco rep I talked to on the the phone was the person who actually built my toilet back in 1998! Talk about customer service).Everything went back together quite easily with the exception of a leaky gasket. In plumbing there's always a leaky gasket! In this case, it was the gasket that linked the toilet bowl to the base. I had tightened it too much as is often the case in plumbing problems. Once you over-tighten a gasket, it collapses and you're out of luck. I took the bowl off-worried that I had broken the porcelain by overtightening, but hadn't-removed the gasket, cleaned it and put it back on. Then reassembled the bowl "loosely" this time. Re-attached the intake and discharge and pumped. Leaking. Tighten the bowl a little. Still leaking. Tighten a little more. Leaking, but a little less. Tighten a liiiittttlee more. Leak stopped. It's a fine line.Toilet works better than ever and leak has stopped. All in all, not as bad as I thought it would be and another adventure complete!
Author Archives: bob
Bottom Job
Well, it sounds a bit more “interesting” than the reality. It’s been 20 months since Charisma was hauled out and the bottom painted. Last time I noted that the bottom paint had not been stripped in many years and was looking like it needed to be completely removed. The problem was the price. A certain boatyard in Alameda that starts with an “S” quoted over $10K to do it. They didn’t really want to do it and recommended; “go to Mexico and get it done there”. Hmm. When I hauled this time at KKMI (a great boatyard) they quoted substantially less to strip all the paint and put on two new epoxy coats and two anti-fouling coats. They have a technique called soda-blasting. High pressure baking soda. Takes offthe paint, but not the gelcoat. Less damage to the boat means less labor. 
While she was hauled I also spent a “fun” 8 hours polishing the topsides. Lot of work, but she looks nice! Oh yeah, and as with most projects, there was a surprise. I’ve had a problem with the raw water pump losing prime when idling for long periods at very low rpm. The engine guy at KKMI told me he felt the pump was worn out. “Take it out and show it to me and I’ll tell you”. So out came the old pump and sure enough, the brass collar around the impeller was worn down and not compressing the blades far enough. $900 later I had a new pump, which I installed. Works great. Lots more water pressure coming out the exhaust too.
The new paint job has resulted in almost a Knot of boat speed. I guess the old paint which was peeling and not smooth anymore was slower than I thought!
Back At Home; Bob Cleans The Winches
Kinda boring compared to sailing across the Atlantic and Equator, I spent Sunday on winch maintenance. Since it was getting ready to rain, I couldn’t do any more varnishing, so tear down the winches it was. I actually haven’t done that in the two years I’ve had Charisma. I’ve only pulled the drums and greased the bearings. But, the large, two-speed main winches have been complaining recently (squealing noises), so time to go all the way. I took pictures as I was removing stuff in the fear I’d never get it all back together. Lots of gears of different sizes, each of which has a bearing and shaft as well as the main bearings, pawls, springs, etc. Took about three hours to do one winch. Had to soak each part in solvent and then brush with a toothbrush to get rid of the old, caked on and hardened grease. Oh boy, lot’s of fun. 
More Monitor
A continuation of the Monitor testing. Went sailing (duh) and let the Monitor do all the work. Spectacular! I don’t need to sail the boat anymore. Well…actually I do. To make any wind vane work effectively you need to carefully balance the boat. Reminds me of using the autopilot in my airplane. Once I got it for my plane, I stopped hand flying the plane, but still spent a lot of quality time trimming the plane so it would fly well. Here’s a couple pics of our new “pilotless” boat. 
The Big Wind Vane Project
Any project that requires EIGHT holes to be drilled through the hull deserves the term BIG. And so it was that my good friend Jon Eberly and I spent last Sunday installing the new Monitor Wind Vane on Charisma.I have to say that while the project was a bit intimidating, the instructions provided by Monitor are/were excellent. The main thing that made this an all day project instead of just a couple hours was the fact that we checked, double-checked, and triple-checked each and every hole to make sure it didn’t go somewhere it shouldn’t. The total time to hang the vane: about 5 hours. We started at 9:30, with an hour for lunch, and we finished “hanging” the vane at about 3:30. Another hour or so the next day putting the wheel adaptor on, leading the steering lines and attaching a double-turning block to lead them to the wheel and it was done. (OK, it wasn’t quite that easy; I torqued the head off one of the bolts and had to back the stub out of the vane mechanism and put in a new one before we could finish). Here’s a couple pics of us hanging the mechanism and getting it bolted to the boat. The first one shows the use of the spinny pole to help hang it while were squaring it to the boat and drilling the holes. The second shows the final “at the dock” install. 
The Monitor install guide has lots of caveats about giving yourself time to learn how to trim the boat correctly to use the vane. They say to give yourself a couple weeks or more to learn how to use it, so I was worried that sailing with it wouldn’t be so easy. However, it worked like a charm first time out. Aim the boat, set the wind-vane, lock the wheel; that’s it! If it’s not exactly going where you want, there’s a fine adjustment where you can rotate the vane (see the picture below) to adjust the final wind angle. Great stuff. 
At the end of the day, the install was easy. Monitor is a great company and very helpful with any questions you might have and very supportive. Best of all; it’s really fun to sail with the vane. You do have to trim the boat properly, but once you do and you set the vane, you now have a whole new sailing experience ahead of you. And you don’t have to worry about amp/hours! Many thanks to Geoff Byrne for many of these pics (he took the good ones). He is an excellent photographer and was gracious enough to let me use his pictures of our first day sailing with the Monitor. If you like great photography, I encourage you to go see his work at www. gmbyrne.com. Thanks Geoff! 
Exhaust Mixer Project
Ah yes the exhaust system; such an exciting project. Well if you’re a boat geek like me it is anyway. So, Charisma had two things going that finally made me tackle this project. One, last time the mechanic worked on the engine, he wrote drastic warnings on the invoice that the exhaust mixer could cause catastrophic issues if it failed and it looked “suspicious”. Ah, oh! Two, after sailing recently, she developed an air lock in the exhaust system and no water was coming out the exhaust. OK, can’t ignore that project anymore. Time to dive in. Here’s a picture of the system before the repair. You can just see some corrosion on the left where the raw cooling water is injected into the exhaust pipe just before it enters the muffler on the bottom of the picture.
After consulting many websites and a couple friends I determined that the only way I would be able to solve these problems was to just take the darn thing apart and inspect it. That of course is always the easy part. Things always come apart easily (hint, hint!) Even though the hoses looked like they would require a lot of “convincing”, my patented method of hose release (run a “pick” around the hose to break the corrosion/seal) the thing actually came out pretty easily. After about half an hour I had it on deck for inspection. It looked surprisingly good. After I disconnected the short hose from the SS exhaust pipe, I saw that what looked like a potential internal catastrophe was really only a little bit of external corrosion pitting where the hose had leaked a bit over time at the hose clamp. I was able to polish the pitting out and bought some new hose and clamps. The inside of the SS exhaust pipe looked like new, albeit black with a light carbon soot, but no hint of corrosion. Here’s the system broken into it’s component pieces. Also, here’s a picture of the internal section of the system where the raw water injects into the pipe.
So, after buying some new hose, new insulating tape and some SS wire to wrap the tape (suitably twisted and secured at each end, aircraft style), I was ready for the re-installation. (Note to self: next time wear long sleeves, long pants and a respirator when handling fiberglass insulation tape. The stuff floats everywhere in the air and itches!) As expected, what comes out never goes back easily. Getting the two bolts on the “far side” of the exhaust flange to go back in, when deep in the lazarette, squeezing my shoulders through the bulkhead and reaching over the transmission was a challenge. After much swearing and a half hour or so of grunting, dripping sweat, using one hand to support my body, the other to turn the bolt and my head strategically pushing the pipe so the flange would seat, the recalcitrant bolts finally succumbed. The rest was just tightening hose clamps to the muffler. But before I put the raw water hose back on the system, I used the dock hose to pressurize the raw water system and hopefully purge the airlock. A faint hope that the cure would be so simple, but worth a try. Took a bit to get the system pressurized but after spraying water all over the lazarette while squeezed cross-legged against the cabin wall, (note to self: wear foul weather gear next time) I finally got water to come out the other side. I actually think there might have been a blockage of some sort that I blew out because after tightening everything down and starting the engine, voila, the system worked and water came out the exhaust as it’s supposed to. Imagine that. A project that actually worked. Just to keep me humble though, the other two projects I was working on refused to comply, so for the weekend, I was only one for three. OK, I’ll take that.
X-Ray Vision For Charisma
Well, almost. Can’t quite see through physical objects, but now we CAN see through the fog. RADAR! (Specifically, it’s the Furuno 1723 C/NT 
We now have a radar system for Charisma. Also, as long as we made the fairly significant effort to put in the radar, we added GPS and AIS to the mix (all Furuno). The bonus is that all three overlay on a single 7 inch chartplotter display. Very cool to be able to see the GPS depiction of where you are–which we’re all fairly used to at this point–but in addition see an overlay to the chart of where radar says you are along with the “blips” that depict “returns” (boats) moving across the screen. Again, something that’s been around, but only fairly recently available as an integrated image on the same screen (overlay). The new addition though is to have the AIS display showing large ships (generally over 100 tons like ferries, tankers, freighters and the like) along with their name, course, speed, MMIS frequency so you can hail them on VHF by name, and much more. The nice thing about this feature is that it’s broadcast over VHF frequencies, so you can “see” ships 20 or 30 miles away! 
The install was fairly complicated and I’m glad I had it done at a boatyard. Pulling the radar cable down the mast requires the mast to be unstepped. This meant the radar cable had to be cut as the plug wouldn’t fit in the mast conduit and then re-wired via a junction box where 12 very tiny wires had to be connected and again the same 12 wires had to be attached to the plug at the chartplotter end. Not too difficult but tedious and ripe for error. Then a fluxgate compass had to be integrated into the system so the radar/gps/AIS all had the same heading data to ensure correct orientation on the chartplotter overlay. The GPS antenna had to be run and finally an extra “add” was a switch that allows us to determine which GPS information to display at the helm (I left in the “old” Garmin 396 for backup/redundancy). Lastly a VHF splitter so we could run the AIS on the same antenna as the VHF.The tough part of the whole set-up turned out to be the fact that the 7″ Furuno only has three ports. One was used for the fluxgate compass input. One for the data out to the B&G system at the helm. One left to combine the GPS and AIS input. Problem is both of the latter two have different data transfer speeds, so integration is tricky. In fact, we first tried a non-Furuno AIS because it was less expensive. Wouldn’t work, so we had to opt for the more expensive Furuno proprietary solution. As a side-note for the techies who might read this: I think it could have been “forced” to work, but it would have required dropping the baud rate on the AIS from 38,000 to 4,800 to “match” that of the GPS. A big data transfer penalty.All the work done by KKMI in Richmond, California. I have to give them huge kudos. Very responsive. Highest integrity and great to work with. Also very proactive. When a problem arose (the AIS integration issue), they were very quick to identify and solve. Huge difference over other yards I’ve worked with and I highly recommend them. They gave a detailed estimate up front and invoicing was comprehensive and accurate. Now I just have to learn how to use the damn thing. Just look at all the new buttons to learn!
To the Farallones (and back)
I wasn’t sure if Saturday would be the right day to single-hand to the Farallones or not. Forecast was for 15-25 with gusts to 30 knots and 6-9 foot waves. Since several sailboats have been lost out there in the past year, I wanted to be careful. But Charisma is not “some boats”. She did an amazing job. The actual conditions turned out to be 25-28 with gusts to 35 knots. I was thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve felt that 25 knots of wind was “calm”, but that’s what it felt like. Waves were about as advertised. 6 feet or so, with the occasional 10 footer. However, with a single reef in the main and the stays’l (jib furled) we made 5+ knots upwind and actually had a nice ride out. With that configuration in the wind and waves, we were also able to tack in about 90, maybe 95 degrees, which was surprising to me. I would have thought we’d have a harder time going upwind. Quite a boat.
The trip out started pretty calm. You can see in the photo going under the gate (around 10AM) that there was little wind, but since the buoy reports were showing a blow just out the gate, I motor sailed with the main already reefed so I could get out since there was a full on flood tide. I wanted to sail, not tack back and forth trying to get outside. Sure enough, by Pt Bonita the wind picked up, engine off and within half an hour the jib was furled and we smashed the 20 miles out. 
Didn’t see another boat all day. I think everyone else decided not to venture out. Charisma was really pretty exceptional. Even though we “flew” pretty high over a couple waves, she didn’t slam once like I’ve felt in other boats in similar conditions. One thing that did surprise me was that when wind and waves pick up you have to drop the main traveller and let the stays’l out further than you would when you’re using the jib. But even with the sails “sheeted out” a bit, she still seemed to point as high. Probably making less leeway that when trying to point higher with the jib up. One fun point in the trip was crossing the “line” from green water to blue. At about 9 miles out, there’s literally a line in the water. One side is green from the coastal influence and the other is blue. No mixing, just an abrupt change. The prep list for the day; jacklines rigged, cowl vents turned backwards, harness with tether and full foulies and seaboots on before going under the bridge. Didn’t want to have to leave the helm, although even in those conditions, she did steer upwind by herself quite nicely and I ended up going to the foredeck a couple times to clear lines and even a trip below to the head with Charisma happily steering over the waves. Downwind is another issue and almost impossible to leave the helm for more than a few seconds when in waves.
All in all a great day. Even hit 9.5 knots coming back. Who says Tayanas can’t surf?
Some New Pics
Short post today. Just a couple new pics from Peter Lyons (www.lyonsimaging.com) taken in January over by Tiburon. 
Up the Mast and Back Up the Mast
Bob sent me up the mast to fix the anchor light and the deck light. Unfortunately, the first time I went up, the safety knot in the halyard was in the wrong spot and I couldn’t get close enough to the masthead light. So down I went with an unsuccessful stop at the deck light (the new bulb didn’t fit) and back up I went to work on the anchor light. Of course, while I was up there, the cold south wind started blowing. Thanks to last year’s Christmas present from Jon & Heather (my own super deluxe climbing harness) and Bob’s handiwork at the winch, I have now safely summitted the mast five times. 
