In an instant

I’ve added something to my safety gear – a wax toilet bowl gasket ring.

The same material helped keep my slip neighbor’s boat afloat the other night.

John, who sails a 1975 Cal 3-30, Stronghold, was on his way to Catalina Island Sunday. He planned to spend the night at Emerald Bay and return Monday in time to watch the first start for the Transpac race, the start for the cruisers and smaller racing boats.

About three hours into his single-handed motorsail Sunday, John heard an unusual noise and his engine seemed to hiccup. It lasted just an instant, he said, and then everything seemed normal. But there shouldn’t be any unusual noises and the engine shouldn’t hiccup, so after thinking about it for several minutes, John decided to throttle back and take a look below.

The Cal 3-30 has great access to the aft end of the engine and the propeller shaft from a side hatch in the starboard quarterberth. Opening the hatch, he was greeted with water gushing in through a broken hose that had secured the propeller shaft's stuffing box to the stern tube through which the shaft exited the boat.

It was a gallons-per-minute leak, a boat-sinking leak, and there was no obvious fix. The propeller shaft remained securely in place, preventing the use of a tapered wooden plug of the sort that can stop a leak from a thru-hull fitting.

When the engine is inside the boat, there has to be some way to get its power to the propeller outside the boat. It is done by running the propeller shaft through a hole in the boat. Water cools and lubricates the shaft. What keeps the water from flooding around the shaft and into the boat is a simple and normally very reliable system called a stuffing box.

The stuffing box isn't really a box. Its not much more than two sections of pipe that surround the prop shaft, one section threaded into the other. An internal gap between the two sections is filled with flax or other material, which prevents the water from coming any further up the shaft, but at the same time does not create any undue friction on the shaft.

The outer section of pipe is the same diameter as the stern tube through which the shaft exits the hull. A length of heavy reinforced hose, much like a car's radiator hose, slips over the stern tube and the stuffing box (pipe) and is held tightly in place by two strong hose clamps at each end. It is designed to drip water while the shaft is turning at the rate of a several drops every minute. (There are other, newer design sealing systems that don't drip at all, but most boats have a traditional stuffing box as described.)

John went back to the cockpit. He shut down the engine, stopped the propeller from spinning, turned the boat back toward the mainland and radioed for help on his marine VHF radio. Sea water soon spilled out of the separate engine bilge under the cockpit and began to fill the lower main bilge in the saloon. Water was pouring in faster than the bilge pump could get rid of it.

Luckily for John he was not yet far from Point Fermin and a Los Angeles County lifeguard boat reached him within about 10 minutes of his mayday call. A high-capacity portable water pump powered by a gasoline engine was quickly put aboard Stronghold, and the water was rapidly sucked out. The leak had flooded the cabin sole with an inch or two of water rising out of the bilge by the time help arrived. His boat would have sunk without the rescue boat's pump.

While the lifeguard boat crew handled the pump, John wrapped towels around the stern tube and propeller shaft and secured them with rope, which slowed the gusher down to a manageable leak. Once the large water pump emptied the bilge, Stronghold’s own bilge pump was able to keep up with the leak.

The LA lifeguards stayed alonside John’s boat as he sailed back home. When they neared Long Beach, the LA crew turned the rescue monitoring over to Long Beach lifeguards, who accompanied Stronghold back to the Alamitos Bay channel entrance.

At that point, John assured them he was doing okay and sailed the rest of the way back to his slip unaccompanied.

A cell phone call during the sail home had a diver waiting at his slip with four toilet bowl gasket rings. John said the diver used two of them, jamming the wax into the cutless bearing that supported the prop shaft in the stern tube. The wax reduced the leak to an occasional drip. Just to make sure, John made several trips to the boat that evening to check.

He said the LA lifeguard told him about the toilet bowl wax trick, noting that it could be done with an overboard dive on the prop shaft no matter how far from shore a skipper was.

With the bi-annual Transpac race starting, John couldn’t help but speculate, “What if that had happened to me half-way to Hawaii. I’d have lost the boat.” As it was, he considered himself very lucky not to have lost the boat anyway.

Monday morning he nudged Stronghold with his dinghy to the boatyard across the channel from our slips, while I steered the wounded vessel. Once lifted out of the water, inspection revealed that the stuffing box had seized on a corroded prop shaft and twisted the heavy reinforced hose, ripping it apart.

Later Monday I headed for the hardware store to buy a toilet bowl gasket ring. $1.79 seemed little enough to pay for something I don’t ever expect to need.

After all, my own prop shaft was replaced earlier this year after 39 years of service, along with new shaft packing in the stuffing box, new hose joining the stuffing box to the stern tube and new, extra-heavy-duty hose clamps. On the other hand, maybe the wax could also seal a crack in the hull if I were ever to hit something in the water.

I think that part of being safe at sea is recognizing a lesson to be learned when it shows up next door.

Sail What You Got

Broken engine or engine removed, it didn't matter. Narrow Escape was a functioning sailboat from the day I bought it. And I took it sailing a lot. This picture, taken by John Dickerson from his Catalina 34, Pelican, was on one of those early days in the fall of 2005.

The picture tells a story for anyone interested in sailing and doing so on a budget. The story is that once I bought the boat and finished with the survey haul-out and initial repairs I was ready for daysailing and Catalina Island cruising in Southern California. Most of the hours and dollars spent thereafter, and there have been a lot of both, were unnecessary.

But I'm a tinkerer. I like to putter around my boat. I like to fix things. I like to make it better. I take pride in my work. I like to look at the results and tell myself that it was worth the cost and the effort. And I believe it.

However, I'm realistic enough to know that this photo shows that other people could logically reach a different conclusion.

If you stick with me on the blog, I'll explain a lot of the things I've done to Narrow Escape since I first got it back in the water. And I'll provide some cost figures, though not accurate to the cent. I didn't keep a lot of the receipts. Besides, I don't really need to know. Its not like I would have wisely invested the money if I hadn't spent it on the boat.

The Nissan 9.8 hp electric start outboard was a fine engine. But a little awkward to use. I did a couple of things to improve that.

I found it hard to reach all the way to the stern to control the throttle when I was motoring with the Nissan. So I bought a HelmsMate outboard extension handle, the $60 model with a universal joint. Problem solved

Trying to shift the engine from neutral to forward and back again, or to reverse was even more awkward. Just when I most needed to be looking forward, docking the boat, I had to turn around and lean backwards through the pushpit to reach the shifter

I couldn't find any off-the-shelf solution, so I made a shifter extension out of plastic plumbing parts from the hardware store.
By trial and error I selected a plastic pipe nipple that would slip over the shifter on the Nissan. To achieve the needed horizontal motion and allow necessary flexibility, I added a 45-degree fitting and a closed cap fitting. The horizontal pipe was given cap fittings at each end.

I joined the two cap fittings between the 45-degree piece and the horizontal pipe with a stainless machine screw and oversize washers inside each cap plus a lock nut. I drilled the holes in the end caps larger, to allow the machine screw to wobble, but not too much. That work was done in increments and tested on the boat until it worked well. Then all of the plastic parts were cemented with plastic plumbing cement.

I made one omission that was discovered in a most awkward fashion. In April, 2006, as my crew and I motored out of my slip in a hurry to reach the starting line for the Newport-to-Ensenada race, the shift extender fell overboard. Air trapped in the long handle (despite the oversize screw hole) kept it afloat long enough for it to be retrieved. Later I added a lanyard to tie the extension to the pushpit when in use.

Albin engine, Part 3

When my Ericson 30 was built in 1968, I'm guessing that its Albin O-21 engine was bolted into place in the hull cavity before the deck and cockpit molding was lowered onto the hull.

Now, it rested in a cave beneath the cockpit sole. Like a sleeping bear, the trick was going to be to coax the injured engine out of the cave, and up and off the boat without dropping it or getting hurt. Then we'd have to get it into John Dickerson's truck for the journey to his well-equipped auto restoration shop.

Weighing about 350 pounds, it was not going to be easy. But there were some advantages. Access to the engine from the side through the starboard cockpit locker was good. The cabin sole was a simple painted surface, not highly varnished teak and holly. A little dirt and even a few scratches weren't going to matter much. The opening aft to the engine from the cabin was large and unobstructed. And a lifting eye was bolted to the cylinder head at approximately the center of fore and aft mass.

The plan was to rig a 1-inch iron pipe through the aft portion of the cabin extending into the engine compartment, through the lifting eye. With everything unbolted, we would then lift the pipe about four inches so the flywheel could clear the lower lip of the engine room bulkhead. Next we would slide the engine forward on the pipe until it could be lifted vertically through the companionway.

With the help of a cable hoist lashed to the boom, the strength of my two companions, John Dickerson and Dick Barnes, and lubricant on the pipe, it worked. Not quickly, not neatly, not quietly. But it worked.

There were the moments when I realized that the engine was hanging about four feet above the cabin sole and I wondered what would happen if it fell. I put the cabin cushions below it.

Swinging the engine over the side of the boat so that it could be lowered into a dock cart on the dock finger was piquant, too.

I was beginning to understand why the quotes for a new diesel engine were approximately double the cost of the engine itself. I would gain more appreciation of that cost ratio as the project progressed.

Albin engine, Part 2

The day after the boat was relaunched, I tackled the problem of the recalcitrant engine again.

This time I pulled the spark plugs and found, to my horror, water.

What did work the day before when I was cranking the engine was the water pump. It dutifully circulated water through the raw water cooling system and out through the cylinder head to the inlet on the exhaust pipe.

Boats use the engine cooling water to cool the exhaust enough so that it can flow through a flexible rubber hose instead of a metal pipe like a car exhaust.

What makes this wet exhaust system work is, well, engine exhaust. It pushes the cooling water through the exhaust hose and muffler and back out into the ocean.

If the engine doesn't run there is no exhaust. So what you end up with is a very efficient system for filling the exhaust hose up with water until it backs up into the manifold, through the valves when they are open, and then into the cylinders. If you crank on a dead engine long enough you may ruin the engine.

Thus I belatedly learned Rule No. 1 for attempting to start a balky engine when the boat is in the water. Turn off the cooling water sea cock until the engine is running.

My immediate reaction, after turning off the cooling sea cock, was to run the starter while a mix of water and air sprayed out through the spark plug holes. Then I started spraying copious amounts of WD-40 into the cylinders and kept cranking. When I wasn't seeing water anymore, I checked the oil dipstick to see how much water had ended up in the crankcase. Not much. I changed the oil, cranked some more and then changed the oil again.

I still didn't know why the engine had not started. In fact, I didn't learn that until several weeks later, when I had time again to do more diagnoses. In the meantime I bought a compression tester. When I hooked it up to a spark plug hole and ran the starter, I discovered that the engine didn't have any compression.

That's when I decided to call me friend and Ensenada Race crewman John Dickerson, who owns Automotive Restorations in Downey, CA and has decades of experience with cars and engines. He also has been a boat owner for years, currently owning a Catalina 34.

The recommendation was to pull the head off the engine and view the damage.

The good news was that the cylinders looked fine. They were not rusted, nor scored. And there was no ridge at the top. Clearly the cylinders had been honed in a recent engine overhaul, and per the receipts the seller provided, there undoubtedly were new rings on the pistons.

The Albin O-21 two-cylinder gas engine in my boat was manufactured in 1967, according to the serial number history. Serial number 1 was built in 1925, so this was an old and relatively simple design.

The valves popped up and down on the starboard side of the cylinders, seating in the engine block. The simple flat cylinder head was cast with combustion chambers that extended off to the side of the cylinders to allow the gas-air mixture to be sucked into the cylinders and the exhaust gases to flow back out. The carburetor was bolted to the bottom of the exhaust manifold and had its own passageways to feed the gas-air mixture to the two inlet valves.

It was the exhaust valves that were frozen in place. The valve for the front cylinder was recalcitrant, but it would move if tapped with a rubber mallet.

By soaking the valve stem with penetrating oil, tapping it down, cranking the engine to raise it again and repeating the process over and over, I eventually got that valve free.

The exhaust valve for the rear cylinder wouldn't budge, however.

John suggested filling the valve chamber with penetrating oil and giving it a few days to work.

After 10 days of trying that, the rear valve remained frozen in place. By now I also had removed the manifold and could see that the lifter for that valve, which bobs up and down on the camshaft low in the cylinder block, also wasn't moving.

Clearly the engine would have to be removed and John graciously volunteered work space in his shop and help getting the engine out.

Father's Day

It was a beautiful sailing day Sunday, despite inner waters jammed with dads and their boats. A few miles offshore the breeze was averaging six knots out of the south-southeast and this ketch and I were having great times.

See the fisherman's staysail flying so gracefully between his main and mizzen masts. Click the picture to enlarge it.

It took some effort to set that sail. I saw that someone had to climb the lower portion of the mizzen on this pilot house ketch, probably about a 60-footer. The fisherman's tack apparently was the culprit. But after it was fixed, it flew perfectly and the self-tending sail tacked and gybed itself as the ketch changed course.

I was sailing alone, but my children were with me in my thoughts and in my heart. Daughter Katie is in British Columbia teaching a class at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. And son Randy, his partner and my grandson were in Pittsburgh at the wedding of a close friend.

I'm a lucky father. My children are successful, happy, and doing things to make the world a little better for their presence here. It was easy being their father, mostly anyway. They were always self-directed and full of ideas. I tried to nurture that rather than ridicule. By the time they were in their early teens I realized they really were smarter than me and accepted it. I tried to let them be responsible for their own goals and achievements.

Take another look at that ketch above. It's sails are set perfectly and it is on a course to windward. Windward is somewhere to its starboard bow and it won't ever get there on its present course. It'll have to tack and follow a zig-zag course if the skipper really wants to get somewhere to windward.

It isn't really possible for me on my boat to know where that skipper is headed. All I can know is that he or she is doing it very well at the moment. That progress could be ruined, however.

What if I could command that skipper to turn more to the right, to point closer to the direction I think the boat should be headed. Parents can do that to their children and the result might be that the child ends up in irons, not really going anywhere, accompanied by a lot of flailing and commotion.

That's never a pretty sight on the water. Nor in life.

Principal Race Officer

Last Saturday was my first time as the Principal Race Officer (PRO) of a sailboat race. I was a bit surprised to learn how demanding the job is. The feedback was positive. Participants seemed to be having fun. I certainly did.

Sailboat racing is viewed by many as an oxymoron, especially racing at the local club level where a really fast boat may occasionally hit 8 or 9 knots. Most sail at the 5 to 7 knot range in a 12-15-knot wind.

I’ve been racing sporadically since I bought my first sailing dinghy (Lehman 12) in 1965, in Denver. I read books from the Denver Public Library to learn how to sail it.

There are sailboat races for every kind of boat, and at all economic levels. Our club sponsors what could be called “run what you brung” events, and people bring every thing from affordable, older boats of 25-feet and up, to the latest 40-something-foot racing-cruising boats. They are able to compete with each other through a handicap rating system.

Racing your own sailboat has the same virtues of most kinds of competition. It makes you better at what you love to do. It imposes discipline. It provides a true measure of achievement. And it is fun.

I learned a lot by being in charge of a race. I saw some expert maneuvers. I saw some flawless teamwork. I saw what not to do the next time I’m racing. And I saw all of that sitting on the cabin top of Narrow Escape, anchored in the waves to form one end of the start-finish line.

It was unusually warm with light winds leading up to Saturday, and the marine weather forecast did not suggest much wind Saturday, either. But by 10 a.m. we already were measuring 6 knots from the south, and both the strength and direction held fairly consistent through the noon start for our series of three races for three separate classes of boats.

Yacht racing is a highly-disciplined sport. It has a set of international rules, and an international jury to which a dispute, even at a minor local level such as ours, could theoretically be appealed. In most cases, races are conducted without any sort of refereeing or judging. The rules are enforced only by the participants themselves through the right to file a protest against another yacht.

The race committee, of which I was chair, would have to hear the evidence, possibly view the damage, and render a binding judgment of right and wrong. There also is provision for a yacht in the wrong to tacitly admit it during the race and take a 360-degree penalty turn to wipe out the transgression.

There were no protests in Saturday’s race.

There are steps required to become the PRO for a race. First comes racing and serving on race committees. Then there is a day-long training course and test conducted under the auspices of US Sailing, which is the United States' member of the International Sailing Federation, and is the US Sailing Olympic Committee. Next was a race in which I served as the understudy to the PRO. Finally I got to be PRO, but with an experienced PRO aboard to coach me and keep things from becoming a complete shambles if I messed up.

The most important job of the PRO is to define a good race course for the participants; a course that will be challenging, fun, long enough to justify the considerable effort in gathering crew members and preparing for a race, yet not so long that few are able to finish within the time allotted. In other words, you have to do a little short-term weather forecasting and predict what the wind will do during the afternoon conduct of the race.

My race was midway along in a series of seven races called the Long Beach Harbor Invitational Series. Each event is run by one of the three local yacht clubs that created and sponsor the series. Saturday it was the turn of Little Ships Fleet Yacht Club, a seventy-year-old institution that can trace its history back through the beginning of modern-day handicap yacht racing.

There were no two boats alike among the thirteen that competed. Instead, each had a handicap rating issued by an organization, Performance Handicap Racing Fleet of Southern California, that exists to rate the relative performance of sailboats.

There were three start times, five minutes apart, one for each of the three classes. The finish time for each boat was recorded. Then the handicap rating was applied to their actual race times to calculate a corrected race time. The boat with the shortest corrected time in each class won that class.

The system seems to work more or less fairly, and has done so for many years, and throughout the country, from all three coasts to the Great Lakes.

Saturday’s course choices seemed to work. They ranged from 10.6 nautical miles for the fastest boats, to 6.6 nautical miles for the slowest. All the boats from all three classes finished with 35 minutes of each other. The boats took about 2 to 2.5 hours to complete their courses.

Depending on boat complexity and the skipper’s preference, the boats raced with three to six-person crews. On the committee boat, we had a six-person crew and everyone was busy with assigned tasks from the time we reached the start area about an hour before the racing began, until all three races were underway. The failure of any one of the six to perform his or her task properly could create an unfair situation for the racers. Race postponement could be the outcome. But there were no failures. The wind held. The races started as scheduled.

Then we relaxed, bobbed at the anchor, munched, read, talked, told tales, and waited to time the racers' finishes.

Afterward, our arrival back at the dock and the eventual posting of the results and awarding of trophies was much anticipated. Hamburgers, chips, beer and sodas, kept the racers occupied long enough to run the finish times through the computer and print the results.

I had never before realized that the PRO gets the last hamburger. If he’s lucky.

Albin engine, Part 1

One day while the boat was still on the cradle during the extended haul-out for the survey, I decided to quickly fix the Albin engine, which wouldn't start.

The seller told me he believed the problem was in the carburetor. He described how he had removed the fuel float bowl, filled it with gasoline, reattached it, and the engine ran for half a minute or so.

Ah ha!, I had thought to myself. The float needle is stuck. That's so easy. It reminded me of fixing the stuck choke on that VW squareback many years ago. I was sure that I was going to have a fully-operational Albin inboard in no time.

The first thing I figured out was that the seller was a lot more dexterous with his fingers than I was. There was no way I could have removed the bowl from the carb, put gas in and reattached it with the gas, or at least most of it, still in the bowl. Especially not in the water. I couldn't even do it with the boat motionless on the cradle.

Instead, I removed the carburetor and took it apart. It was a Solex 26, which I would later learn was irreplaceable, and it was in sorry condition. The bottom of the float bowl was coated with JB Weld or an equivalent product. Undoubtedly the bowl had corroded because of water in the fuel sitting in the bowl and someone had decided to fix it. The fix didn't look recent.

What it did was limit the movement of the float so that the needle valve remained closed when the float was resting on the bottom of the bowl. I fixed that by bending the brass tab and got the carburetor to the point that I could blow air through the fuel inlet into the bowl. Ah ha! I'm a genius. This engine is fixed.

Even though the boat was high and dry, I decided I could fire it up for a few seconds to prove my success. A lot of cranking ensued. But no ignition. I removed the plugs and verified that they sparked. If you have fuel and you have spark you have ignition. Hmmm. I didn't have ignition.

I bought new plugs. The old ones were rusty. And I went about my other tasks, deciding not to try starting it again until it was in the water.

After the boat was launched, I spent some time at the boat yard dock trying to get the engine to run. Finally I gave up, pushed the electic start button on the outboard, and motored back to the slip. I had been paying the slip rent since the boat was hauled. I would have about six weeks to stay in that King Harbor slip while my other boat was in my slip in Long Beach awaiting purchase.