Messing About In Boats

 

Some of you are wondering why we haven’t left Key West and started cruising yet.  Well, we have.  Sorta.   

In any endeavor, there is a certain amount of planning and preparation that goes on.   Sailing off for a few months is no exception.  The thing that most people do not understand, and we want to explain, is that there are things unique to cruising a sailboat that make planning a particular date to “leave” a difficult process.  In the first place, cruising isn’t about rigid structure and dates.  It is about the process.   It is about exploration and adventure.  It has been our experience that when you set a date to meet someone at a particular spot, you are only asking for trouble.  Indeed, if you look at any cruiser’s rally where many sailboats get together to sail to a particular destination, inevitably there are a few who don’t make it to the starting line on time.  Sure, poor planning can play a part.  But often it is just the nature of the beast when preparing a sailboat that different delays crop up.  Because so many systems are in such a small area, when you tear into one thing, you discover other things which must be fixed, replaced, repaired or toyed with until you can focus your attention back on the original project.   A.D.D. is not only common on boats, it is contagious.   One could argue that O.D.D. (ie: odd) is a secondary infection.  It is not always easy to categorize boat projects into what is “safe” or “necessary” or “that would be nice and I just want to play with this little thing some more”.  

Corrosion at its finest.

So we have had a long list of boat projects to do.  Some of them involving new equipment, some replacements, some maintenance and some “I’m glad I discovered this bolt is corroded through before it failed mid-ocean”.  Of the thousands of hours that went into building a boat in the first place, many thousands more are spent maintaining it.  It would not be unfair to say that we know this boat like the back of our hands and yet there are still many things to keep track of at a given time.  Here is a short list of categories.   

Engine, sails, canvas, plumbing, electrical, interior, exterior, rigging, dinghy/outboard, fuel/water, supplies, safety, varnish, electronics, dog food...   

Within those categories are often many other items which must be addressed.  But by way of example, here is one little item that needed to be checked off the list.  Read on at your own peril.  

REPLACED THE DEPTH TRANSDUCER (aka: “That Was Easy” [tm])   

Our depth transducer is as old as the boat and needed replacing.  Not because it didn’t work at all, but because the old analog electronics made by Datamarine that tell us what depth of water we have under the boat don’t work properly anymore.   Datamarine went out of business years ago, so we can’t just easily upgrade.  The transducer is a small bronze or plastic device that sticks through the hull of the boat and sends a sound wave signal down through the water.  The sound bounces back and the delay in the return signal tells it how deep the water is.  This comes in handy when in the Bahamas where there might only be a few inches of water under the hull.  It also comes in handy as a navigation tool in deeper waters when finding contours on the bottom which help confirm where you are.  Hey, let’s just pick out a pretty shiny new bronze transducer from the West Marine Catalog!  HA!

Our old transducer is toward the front of the boat on the centerline of the hull and sits in a small three inch horizontal notch on the gently sloping hull midway between the waterline at the bow and the keel at the bottom of the boat.  It has a 2-3/8" surface pointing directly down.  One might think this goes all the way through to the inside of the boat, but it does not.  The part that sticks inside the boat is a 1" bronze threaded pipe with a wiring sticking out of it.  So by a process of deduction honed through years of higher education, we deduced the bottom part is bigger than the top part.  Thus, to get the thing out, we needed to loosen the retaining nut and through force of will and torque, push/hammer it down and out to remove it. [Note, this works best when the boat is hauled out of the water and sitting on dry land.  Otherwise, water would probably gush in quickly, and soon after the boat could possibly become a sunken treasure.]  From the photo, you can discover like we did that the bottom part is about 2" high and circular by 2-3/8" wide and about 8" long.  It fit perfectly in the hole.   The thickness of the hull in that area is about 4 ½".   The extra length is to fit a nut down on the shaft to secure the transducer to the hull.  

Old transducer, on the way out.

Old transducer hole.

New transducers are all 2" around.  Most of them are 4" long.  So that’s a problem.  The West Marine catalog had nothing to help us.  

And hey, if you want a new transducer, you need something to display the data it is putting out.  We decided we liked the new Raymarine digital displays so we wanted a transducer that would talk to Raymarine.   However, our GPS is a Garmin and can display depth.  But only if it is talking to a NMEA0183 transducer.  HA!  As it turns out, our Garmin is a couple years old and we can’t find a transducer to talk to it.  So back to the Raymarine.  Try finding a Raymarine transducer that is the right size.  Nope.  It is too short and too small.  But surely you can put a 2" transducer into a 2-3/8" hole, no?  Well, maybe......  

As you can tell, the hole in the boat is 4 ½" that narrows down from 2-3/8 to 1".   Nobody makes a transducer shaped like that anymore.   Ok, so we will need to make the hole work with a 2" transducer. Now to find one that long.   After calling around, we start hearing the name “Airmar”.  In one conversation, someone lets slip that “Airmar makes pretty much all the transducers in the world for everybody”.  A call to them is sorta helpful.  After a bit they refer us to their wholesaler, Gemeco.  The Gemeco people will make time for stupid sailors with stupid questions who don’t understand much about transducers, but that is only because Gemeco actually sells Airmar products, but since they don’t sell directly to anyone, they can refer us to several online distributors who will actually take your cash in exchange for a product.  Multiple calls to multiple sellers does not clear up what kind of transducer we need or if they even have a properly sized transducer in stock.  We spent most of a very intense day online while making calls to various distributors, Airmar and Gemeco in order to find a transducer that can be modified on their end so that we can somehow work with it on our end to make it fit in the existing hole.  Oh, and another morning doing the same thing.   As it turns out, you can get a transducer with speed, depth AND temperature all in one!!  Naturally, that is $800 for just the speed part and they don’t make it in a size that will fit the boat.  By the way, we have a separate transducer for speed.  It has a little paddle wheel that sticks through the side of the hull about a foot away from the depth transducer.  It is in a protected spot where it can’t be harmed by the big nylon straps from the Travel Lift when we haul the boat out of the water each time.  The depth transducer, on the other hand, is directly in the middle of the boat where the straps often touch and hold the weight of the boat, so it must be rather beefy to handle such loads.  So the all-in-one transducer really isn’t.  There is the solid state one with no moving parts which costs a fortune and then the one with the a paddle wheel that is more affordable but can’t be on the centerline of the boat because the boat straps will destroy it.  After toying with this idea, we decide to go with just a depth transducer and leave the new speed and temp transducer for another time.  (Sigh.)

During this time we spoke with our good friend Bill Ramos at Shannon Yachts, the people who built our boat.  We put in one or two calls a year to Bill.  We can just say “Hull # 95" and he knows who we are.  As always, Bill couldn’t be nicer and refers us to his electronics guy who has yet another opinion as to what might work since he has experience installing transducers into Shannons.  He says that it is something of a challenge to replace the transducer and he had it done on a boat somewhat recently.   “You need to get the boat yard involved because there needs to be some fiberglass work done on the hull to make it work” and “that ran a few thousand dollars”.   Uh huh.  We are not interested in stimulating the economy for four grand to replace a simple depth transducer.  And we are not at all interested in involving Robbie’s Boat Yard at any level.  (See previous post about our feeling on that subject here.)

We know there must be a way to put in a 2" transducer in our hull.  After the above noted “research”, we found a transducer that was long enough.  The core of it was located inside a submarine shaped fairing that sticks outside the hull, something that would not work on our boat.  We figured we could ditch the fairing and use just the transducer.  Cool!   Sure enough, they are willing to set that up for us and kindly keep the $150 fairing for no charge!   So by the end of the second day, we were fairly confident in ordering up a transducer we thought we could make fit our boat.  

Did we mention that it was a “Garmin” type transducer?  They didn’t make this one in a Raytheon friendly version. Waaaa!!!  We wanted the Raytheon transducer because we loved the Raytheon display :(((   But hey, maybe we could get this Garmin version to talk to our Garmin!   Not so fast buddy.  Our Garmin talks the old NMEA 0183 standard, an electronic language that is going the way of Latin and the current Pope.  We opted for the newer NMEA 2000 language.   Woo hoo!  Somewhere in this process we were told that “pretty much any NMEA 2000 product will talk to any other NMEA 2000 product, which means a Garmin transducer really is the same as a Raytheon transducer as long as they are NMEA 2000.  Buuuuut, they only make our transducer in a Garmin version, not a Raytheon version.  So how can all this common language stuff be true? We dunno yet.  But we got the Garmin NMEA 2000 transducer and hopefully it will plug into something somewhere down the road and all our electronics can talk to each other and tell bedtime stories about how deep the ocean is.  

Hole saw, with Starboard chunk.

The new transducer arrived and we pulled its shiny little bronze body out of the box (minus the submarine fairing which at this point I wanted as a souvenir of our efforts) and fondled it.   Now to install it.  The first problem was making a centered 2" hole inside the 2-3/8" hole.  If you know what a hole saw is, it has a central 1/4" guide drill in the middle.   But the middle of this hole was a blank spot and therefore useless to the guide drill bit.  So we taped over the small hole and poured epoxy into the 1" existing hole.  Atfer letting it set up, we then had a solid center to use to drill through the remainder of the hull.  After drilling the 2" hole, we could then slide the new transducer in.  But we needed to have the transducer flush with the outside of the hull, not the recessed old 2-3/8" hole.  What to do.....

We checked around at various places to find washers, nuts, or anything to fill the 3/8 gap but for reasons unknown, not even Home Depot stocks such obviously necessary items.  So we made our own spacers.  We used the hole saw to drill holes into some Starboard (tm), which is a plastic replacement for wood used on boats.  Then we took the hand saw and cut around the outside of these holes to form a crude washer/spacer.  We then shaped and faired the spacers so they would fit.  After multiple checks and re-checks, we got the transducer to fit perfectly into the hole and lie flush with the bottom of the hull. 

New transducer with home-made spacers attached.

Moving inside the boat, we put the retaining nut on the top of the transducer and tightened it down.  Because of the U shape of the hull, the nut wouldn’t go all the way down.  So we got the grinder out of storage to grind down that portion of the fiberglass so the nut would have room to fit.  Problem is that the grinder wouldn’t fit down into the hold to do the grinding.  So we fashioned yet another spacer out of Starboard (tm) to fit under the nut.  After making sure everything fit, we backed the transducer out, gooped up the whole mess with an appropriate amount of calking, tightened it down and WaaaaaaLaaaaa !   The following item was checked off our list: Replace Depth Transducer.  Check.   That Was Easy! (Tm).   Total elapsed time on this one project: 3 days. 

McGyver at work.

So when we say we’ve been “working on boat projects”, this is the kind of thing that often takes place.  Sometimes it goes easy, but most of the time a simple project turns into a larger one.  It could just be us, but having talked to many boat owners over the years who do their own work, this seems to be the nature of the beast.  You can always pay someone else to maintain your boat, but the intricacies of a given project and knowledge of the boat itself are crucial.  We derive a lot of satisfaction from completing a job.  It often brings out the McGyver in us and forces us to be resourceful and creative.  In general, we try to do a good job although occasionally we use the “it’s good enough for who it’s for” quality assurance program.