Outboard maintenance

With it still being too cold to really get done what I need to on the boat, I figure it's a good time to do the season prep on the outboard. A couple of warmer days next week should allow for some work on the next boat project...

Australia & Props...

Well, I finally got the timing and got through to ARCO in Australia on a non holiday. The very helpful gentleman I talked to on the phone sounded like he might have had some nice libations yesterday to celebrate :-) The bearing for the winch will be here next week. In typical "no longer in business or production" style, the shipping will cost more than the part.

I also got a call from Martec Engineering who I sent our Martec folding prop in to be refurbed. Turns out it's probably the original prop from 1988 and has had electrolosys issues and needs to be replaced, not refurbed. So that budget item tripled- yikes! But at least it will be nice and new.

Australia Day

Leave it to me to call Australia on a national holiday... didn't realize until this morning why my dialing would have been going unanswered last night. I guess I wouldn't answer on the 4th of July, so I'll try again tonight.

Frustrating missing bearing in winch

So I'm putting the Barient 32 back together and discover I'm missing a bearing! I'm always very carefull about not losing parts when I'm working on winches- and it's an internal bearing, not one of the ones that falls in the water when you take a drum off- so I know that I didn't lose it, it wasn't there when I took it apart. So I've contacted ARCO in Aus to see how soon I can get one. Oh, the joys...

Winches- another project...

There's always another project when you own a boat, especially an older one. It's too cold to work on buffing or bottom painting, so I'm doing what I can indoors. Current project: Winches. The 2 primary winches in the cockpit are Barient 32 self tailers. These differ from the normal Barients in that the whole gear structure is a contained unit that is removable. So I took one off yesterday and brought it home.

Here is the gear unit and the drum.

The next step is getting the gear unit apart so the parts can be cleaned, lubed, and re-assembled.

On a winch this big and complicated, I clean it up in sections- that way there is less confusion in the jigsaw puzzle of getting it back together. Smaller winches don't have many identical parts, so it's less of an issue.

Some 2008 photos

This was the first leg of the local Double Handed Race... Sequoia is the big stick in the lower right. We finished 5th out of 14 in our class.
























This is another shot from the Double Handed Race. Aircraft shots are hard to get, thanks to the club for arranging it! (we're the lower boat)























And early Wed night "beercan" race. Sequoia is second from the left with the Red/Orange/Yellow spinnaker.





















Here's the finish of that early Wed night race- what a gorgeous night!

On the hard- and more maintenance...

Sequoia came out of the water in early December. There had been a steady stint of high pressure coupled with north winds that always push much of the depth out of our little creek, so we had to wait until just the right time to catch a south wind at high tide. The boat came out and looked good. The bottom paint has lasted two seasons and is just about gone- which is perfect. Only a light sand and repaint will keep it protected without all the buildup that we sanded off a couple of years ago. Hindsight on that project showed that spending the $$$$ on soda blasting would have been the better method.

We had a great season on the boat. We did some more casual racing with the club since the boat we crew on was racing less. We also did another Governor's cup race, but snagged a crab pot about 25 miles into the race and ended up DNF. We also took two weeklong cruises, one in the spring and one in the fall along with various weekenders.

Things have been pretty busy with the holidays, plus one of our pups has a terminal bone cancer and is not long for the world- so the boat has been sitting patiently on jacks. As always with any boat, especially an older boat (it's now been 20 since Sequoia was trailered out of the factory in CA), there is the constant maintenance list...