We have not been able to do as much sailing as I would like due to continuing engine problems. I have changed filters in for the engine fuel so many times it is not even funny any more. So I decided I had enough. And ripped the tanks open to see what was going on. I am glad I did, even if it was A LOT of work, with lots of interior having to be dismounted. This is what they looked like:
It will set me back a bit over a week to get all the tanks cleaned out and the interior put back in place.
What makes a door funky, you may ask? Well, for example the fact that it is in three pieces. Two on separate hinges, to allow opening only the upper part, and keeping the lower in place as a wash-over protection. The third part is a small fold-able corner of the upper door part. It uses frictional hinges to stay in place, and allows the upper door to be completely open and out of the way without colliding with the cockpit sofa backrest.
In other news, the doors to the forward toilet and shower was cut and put in place upside down, in a moment when I wasn’t looking. Too bad, now we have to make new ones… We also tested the ballast tanks today. First there was a very major leak due to a hole in the pumps, then only a small leak that hopefully is fixed for tomorrow. The emptying works fine:
At 5 o’clock in the morning on September 11, 2000, I arrived in St Johns, Newfoundland after a rather difficult crossing from Qaqortoq on Greenland. The following 30 hours were some of the weirdest in my life, with a complex set of personal events intermixed with the approaching hurricane Erin and the terrorist attack that took place a few hours later. I could write a very very long text about this, but what is important today is the fact that we were short of fuel.
Now St Johns is a fishing/commercial/naval harbor, with zero yacht traffic except on rare occasions. There was simply no refueling place equipped with a small enough nozzle to fit in my tank fill. And Canadian laws are very strict about environmental damage by diesel spills in the water. So they all refused to fill our tanks using a funnel.
We were moored behind a small charter trawler, whose captain (like most Newfoundlanders, I later found out) was an extremely nice and helpful guy. He called down a fuel truck, but that met with the same problem, the nozzle was to big for the small hole. After the second fuel truck who was called for had the same problem, my newfound friend got in his car, drove 30 km to his home, and came back with a large oil barrel and a manual pump. We proceeded to call one of the fuel trucks back, and had them fill the barrel on the dock. Then we pumped the fuel by hand over to our yacht.
I decided that I did not want another 9/11, so the Journeyman is equipped with dual work-boat size (50mm internal diameter) fills. Some trucks also has quite high pressure in their pumps, and will refuse to fill your tanks if the air breather outlets are not the same size (too small breather outputs cause overpressure and thus spills). So I use three breathers instead of one. Plus they all have water-locks at their hull exits. Never again…
In the picture you can also see the valve for the breather pipe of the ballast tank. Why is there a valve on the breather, you ask? Because in case of an emergency I want to be able to seal the ballast tanks shut. This will give an extra 4-5 tons of buoyancy to the hull.
I would like to publicly thank the engineers at Johnson Pumps for helping me come up with a solution to the trim-tank pump. The trim-tanks are very big and they should not take too long to fill. This can easily be done if you use a big, heavy expensive impeller pump. But besides being big, heavy and expensive these pumps are also usually fitted with non-watertight electric motors, which makes placing the pump in the bildge problematic.
When I told the engineers at Johnson about these problems, they came up with the idea of connecting two of their biggest submersible pumps in series. This was a little tricky because these pumps are not made to be connected to a piping system. But after plenty of searching I was able to find a good solution to connect the pumps to the piping:
This gives me a pump that is completely waterproof, and weights and costs about 20% of a large impeller pump, but still gives about 60% of the capacity. With this pump it will take roughly 10 minutes to fill the trim-tank.
One of the design faults of most modern cruisers that annoy me is the positioning of the water inlets. I don’t think I have ever been on yacht where there hasn’t been problems with some water inlets being above water at some points of sail.
The effect can be bad, for example not being able to flush the toilet. Or not getting water to the galley. There is also the problem with making water. All watermakers require a salt water supply free of air bubbles. With bubbles in the water the watermaker stops working. And when you’re sailing there is always a lot of bubbles under the hull, even if the water inlet is well below the waterline. So usually you have to stop to make water. For 6 hours or so. Pretty boring.
So for the Journeyman 60 I decided to fix this:
This picture shows the water inlet tank. All seawater will come in through this tank. It sits in the center of the boat at the deepest point of the hull, so it is always under water. Inside the tank there is a system for separating air bubbles from water. The air is let out again and all devices in the boat that need water gets an uninterrupted supply free from bubbles.
No more getting water in a bucket from the galley to flush the toilet on the port tack!
Recent Comments
Off to Uruguay with plenty of Guacamole (1)
Carlo: I see the journey is close to Uruguay, the wind on Monday is turning...
Disgusting seafood. (2)
Pieter Kommerij: Hey Jesper, The 4 months i have spend with my boat in Buzios...
Kjell Litwin: Snygg solbränna;-) Kanske en räksmörgås de kommande dagarna?...
Nice morning adventure (2)
Stefan Nyberg: A bit of a addional pulse in that situation is not...
Things that went wrong and mistakes to learn from (3)
Peter Bryttne: Hej! Jag tror att hela din resa från idé till genomförande kan...
Fridge tune-up time. (1)
Martin: This has to be one of the longer stories in the boat. I am happy it...
Dear Johnson Pumps, is it supposed to look like this? (3)
Jesper: Hehe the pump is totally destroyed inside. All the corrosive metal...
Carlo: The pump looks wet inside, can you clean and dry it and seal the pump...