Toilet Woes and General Maintenance
Waste Pump Maintenance As is bound to happen eventually, our manual toilet pump started leaking. Our Lavac toilet came with a Whale Mark V. That original pump stopped creating suction a few years ago, so we replaced it with a new Whale Mark V and bought a rebuild kit for the old one to keep […]
Why is Our Engine Overheating?
We’ve been really lucky with our engine. Sure, we haven’t used it that much, but it’s never failed us, and until recently, overheating wasn’t an issue. For something that’s 43 years old with an unknown number of hours or maintenance history, that’s pretty good. So when the high-temperature alarm for our trusty Perkins sounded, needless […]
New Sailing Instruments
We considered a few different brands of sailing instruments. So why did we pick Raymarine? It’s a pretty popular brand in the sailing industry, and they have a pretty good reputation. Ultimately, it was because we already had a Raymarine radar. Our boat came with a pretty old Standard Horizon speed log and wind gauge. […]
Cleaning Our Water Tanks
Our water tanks are fairly new. Removing the old stainless steel tank was one of the first projects we did back in 2013. That tank had at least one hole in it and the entire bottom was rusty brown. We think the old tank was about 90 gallons. The two polyethylene, rotomolded tanks we replaced […]
Our Stuffing Box Leaks
Yep, our stuffing box leaks. But wait…it’s supposed to. We have a traditional stuffing box (also known as a stuffing gland, packing gland, and other variations). In general, it’s “an assembly which is used to house a gland seal. It is used to prevent leakage of fluid, such as water, between sliding or turning parts.” […]
Making a Custom Boom Vang
A boom vang (US) or kicking strap (UK) is a line or piston system on a sailboat used to exert downward force on the boom and thus control the shape of the sail. There are a lot of really nice boom vangs for sale that I’m sure are fairly simple to install. We considered buying […]
We Almost Lost Our Prop!
Note to self: Don’t let the dinghy painter get tangled in the prop. It seems like a pretty basic premise, and yet, that’s exactly what we did. What started as a quick little sail out to Middle River for the weekend, turned into yet another project to fix. As we were trying to anchor in […]
Fixing Our Wheel Brake
What’s so important about a wheel brake? That’s what I wondered when we couldn’t get ours to work. Back in 2012 during the survey we noticed the wheel brake didn’t work. It’s basically just a twisty knob on the side of the steering pedestal that tightens a clamp around a shaft that stops the wheel […]
Installing a “New” Self-Tailing Winch
Actually it’s a used winch we bought at a local consignment shop. It was broken and Rich was able to fix it for super cheap. We bought the winch to replace an old Barlow 20 we have for our mainsheet. While the Barlow works just fine, it isn’t a self-tailing winch and it only has […]
Measuring for and Installing a Mack Pack Mainsail Cover
We’ve had our new sails and Mack Pack mainsail cover for about a year now and absolutely love them. After using the 106% genoa last year, we decided to get a smaller yankee jib (about 85%). We had some issues using the larger genoa on the river where we sail. The wind is often flukey […]