Unmooring and unmoreing: How we've done it

Slightly cobwebby, but in good working order

This was the good, if slightly neglected, ship Alchemy a couple of days ago. Good, because I try to leave her ready to sail and motor at all times, but neglected, because several weeks of this rapidly expiring summer has been spent on processes and events both tangential and necessary to slipping the dock lines. Our levels of effort, labour, confusion and delay have been so high as to cause the greatest gap in blog posting (horrors!) of at least the last decade. But on that fact hangs a tale.

Had you asked my wife and I, say, three months ago, if we were particularly materialistic, we would have demurred. We've never owned a car, never had cable TV, and have not, having lived in half a house with tenants above, had the space to acquire much save books...or so we thought. But as the date of the close of the house sale approached, we realized that our nearby flat, rented for just one year so that our son could finish high school nearby with minimal disruption (and, to be fair, so we would be no further away from our boat and its later refitting stages) was in no sense large enough to accommodate our vast amount of "stuff". Furthermore, we needed to rent a garage from our new landlords just to hold my power tools, things migrating to the boat over the winter, things I would want in our new, out-of-town place (more on this below), and the sort of heavy-duty racking, sawhorses and bottle-jacks one hesitates to just put on Kijiji.

The new flat's living room was quite spacious until I put in a load of dining room furniture and six seven-foot bookshelves.

A particular struggle were my books. Bibliophilia is only a problem in confined spaces, and our old house only looked small because there were so many damned books. Maybe two or three thousand, down from four or five thousand before I did a radical cull a few years ago. Now, apart from service manuals, almanacs and "how to cruise" books, the approximate space budget on Alchemy for recreational reading in paper form is probably five paperbacks per crew. So disposal, even in terms of getting to the interim land-based habitations, was going to be a big deal. And so it was.

These are just two of the half-filled boxes of just sea-related books I either sold or gave to my club, which had to build a new set of shelves to bear them. The filled boxes numbered at least 15, all transported by bicycle cart.

So the Great Culling commenced with nautical books. Keeping in mind I run a business from home and am not actually retired, this took a couple of weeks, and, as is the way of such things, the idea of lifting boxes up a flight of stairs at the height of summer led to an increasingly unsentimental attitude to the keeping of books I would not be taking on the voyage. Off about 500 salty volumes went. Enjoy, National Yacht Club members and visitors: I did.

You know what's large? A windvane in an aft cabin is large.

Certain other pieces belonging to the boat had to vacate the garage also. The wind vane above was one. Oddly, because I have complex reno plans for the aft cabin this winter, I will likely install it on the stern, but not make it functional with lines until next spring's launch. I'll fashion a cover to keep the weather out.

Atomic 4 oil pan, one of the many valuable pieces that came, sales pending, to the new garage.

While I made a nice little packet in July on some Atomic 4 parts, I had to haul (via hand-cart, see below) a few items to the new garage, which we have rented only until November 30 and which is not quite filled, but certainly piled higher than I'd hoped.

The vast uncluttering included the running of a garage sale (once enough crap had been removed from the garage to permit the sale!); two separate visits to load up a van with scrap metal, surplus racking and far too many fence posts; the rental of a dumpster bin in which went a brim-ful collection of unwanted piano (I tried to give it away, as it was free to me 10 years ago, but you can't give them away); and a visit from a two-tonne "GOT-JUNK" truck we filled with the remainder of our crap.

Moved by mechanical advantage: it's good to be a sailor.

Amid all these focused efforts were a constant stream of chests of drawers, boxes of books, racking, flooring, fans, heaters and related mildly desirable acquisitions to the curb in front of the house to be sold, where the magic of big-city salvage made most of it vanish. We also used the garbage and recycling bins at both properties (our landlords are away on holiday) and some bins at the club to dispose of things like sails I'll never use.

Not materialistic, eh? Reality and the terrified housecat, who was moved last in an increasingly barren, echoey house, begged to differ.

She is not coming out until you've damned well finished moving.

But, painfully (for I was moving the three blocks from old house to new flat via hand-cart, the process of which ground down the turning wheel bearings to little shavings), the decluttering proceeded.

A typical array of Not Wanted on the Voyage.

We were astounded, as was the buyer of our house on her final walk-through the day prior to the scheduled close, at how much space was actually on the property once we'd nuked, shifted or otherwise vanished our ridiculous amount of possessions. 

The mancave returned to its original form as a stable.

The dark spot in the middle is where the horse-pee drained away to whatever sewer arrangements pertained in 1900.

Quite airy, minus mahogany accents and IKEA shelving.

Somehow, we managed to jam in an end-of-August day trip to the nearby town of Trenton. I had been surveying real estate there on the basis of several parameters, which can be summed up as follows:

• 1) We wanted to maintain a Canadian, and specifically, an Ontario, address while we were off a-voyaging. We did not want to "sell up and sail", but to keep a toehold in our native country. This would simplify certain interactions with the government if we had just one principal residence, even if it was a pied-a-terre in the basement of a place we otherwise rented out.
• 2) We needed this place to be within driving distance of a relative skilled in property management who would be our point person with said tenants and who could do, or arrange to have done, maintenance as needed.
• 3) We needed to be beyond the "halo of greed" generated by Toronto's insane house valuations in order to maximize our bang for buck of our Toronto house sale. We did not care to tie ourselves or our gotten gains to Toronto, with its high taxes but limited upside for rent (and ease of access to our possessions, when required). At the same time, we needed the place to be of sufficient size to have a train and a bus stop, and to be close to a major highway. Trenton has all three and it's 130 km. or 90 minutes by car east of Toronto.
• 4) We needed said house to be of sufficient value to hold its purchase price for the next five years in a town with both a tight rental market, but also with relatively high incomes. Trenton has a nearby university, light manufacturing, a big new marina and recreational industries (it's the start of the Trent-Severn Canal system) and a large airforce base (CFB Trenton).

So we saw five places with the rather odd request that "a separate entrance granny flat plus a garage and shed...the rest just has to be rentable" was the mandate. Our Trenton-area real estate agent complied as best she could in a place where maybe a couple of hundred houses of any type change hands in a year. A couple of hundred houses within walking distance of me, by contrast, are getting quarter-million dollar renovations as I type here in Toronto. Our old house is also slated for some version of creative destruction.

Just as an addendum to how we afforded the house (and, by extension, the good ship Alchemy) in the first place, I'll recap by noting that we paid off our house in 2006. It had doubled in value since 1998 when we bought it, paying it off via tenants' rental income and dedicated (bi-weekly mortgage payments) debt reduction, so once paid off, we borrowed against it to the tune of a 40% loan structured as a new, first mortgage. As we had paid off the house in seven and a half years once already, we got attractive terms of about 2.15%.

We had tenants paying down the mortgage and we kicked in a few thou a year as a top-up. Long story short, we were down to $60K owed (still at around 2%) last summer. We wanted to have the flexibility to sell the house, now valued at over a million due to location, so we converted that to a HELOC and the last pair of tenants conveniently moved on. We paid off the HELOC at $1,000/month and are once again mortgage-free. The line of credit also allows us to renovate in anticipation of sale, which we never actually did, opting for an "as is, where is" exclusive listing, and because we had so little to do directly with paying off the 2006 loan, we essentially consider the passagemaker we will shortly move aboard to be "a free boat".

Of course it isn't. There's tens of thousands in gear and (mainly my) labour aboard. But it was a smart way to afford a boat using the house as a successful and friendly bank. Let's face it, no bank would loan money for a 30 year-old boat! Also, few home owners would live as on-site landlords in the less appealing part of the house without car or cable TV or much in the way of vacations for years on end  in order to eliminate debt. But that was the only way to pull this scheme off, which I described to Mrs. Alchemy in 2006 as "a sleigh ride you can't leave once you've started down the icy slope." Which was, in retrospect, a little melodramatic.

Sticking with the real estate component of making the crusing life possible, I won't bore my long-suffering readers with the saga and photos of the somewhat odd places we saw, but they were all of a price that our house sale in Toronto would have allowed us to buy all five, with a bit left over. But we settled (very rapidly; having Mrs. Alchemy's retired home inspector father's input helped here) on a house very reminiscent of my youth in the suburbs. Behold: The Storage Locker.

I am easily swayed by proper drainage.

This house has everything we wanted, save for the separate entrance. We will have to sort that out with whatever tenants we acquire, but it's no biggie. Some of the features were fated to appeal to me: a separate, automated 17 KW, natural-gas genset that will heat and light the house should the main power fail...

It's called a Generac, and it looks clever.

 ...plus "hydronic heating", which the home inspector deemed a very tidy installation.

I like tidy installations.

The tenants will have to pay off all the utilities, and we'll handle the taxes. We'll be doing some minor repairs and will have to shift the garage contents from here to there by November, at which point we will know how much space the rest of our possessions will take up. This crazy plan may actually come together. In the meantime, we are renters who will also be owners who will be prepping to be landlords who live on a boat.

A colourful symbol of hope and refraction.

So now we are ensconced in the new and frankly very nice apartment. Boxes are being (finally) unpacked, and after a titanic struggle with the idiot phone company, my landline is working.

One of the five technicians over four separate visits dispatched to fix what was essentially a work order screw-up. Can't wait to install my SSB.

We are enjoying the balcony off our bedroom and have recreated, sort of, the "fire pit" area of our former back yard, minus the fire, save for a candle or two.

At night, the trash pandas sing.

Now that I am beginning to unwind from the ridiculous level of dirt, detail work, sweating and hauling and lifting that this interminable process has demanded, I've come to the realization that all those who intend to cruise must come to terms with: possessions not directly related to the safe operation, repair and maintenance of the boat must be ruthlessly reduced and scruntinized, because there's not only limited space on a boat, but you can't leave most things unstowed when underway, because of the rather good chance they may become projectiles. Extending this (minus outside of earthquake zones the projectile consideration) to houses has made us realize that the urge to acquire, whether it be through inheritance, scavenging (much of our furniture was cleaned-up curbside acquisitions or bargain-hunting (we have enough tinned food to last a year) is, or can be, pathological. Material goods can save your life, but they also have the power to restrain your life. Sentiment can be a set of chains, and so can fear of poverty: we gave to charity about a dozen full bags of surplus clothing but really, the boat's only got room for maybe 10 days' of t-shirts and shorts and two sets of "shore clothing"; the rest is foulies and boat-specific gear. So there's still work to be done on that front. We all need, I feel, to "unmore" our lives. This process has taught me that less is more.

I have also come to terms with not, in the usual sense, anticipating missing our house much. Partially, this was because we paid it off (twice) via rentals to a rotating cast of tenants of varying degrees of aptitude; we lived in the dimmer, less renovated, more cluttered half and while I enjoyed and continue to enjoy the surrounding neighbourhood, the house was a means to an end. It's certainly paid off in the monetary sense, but that same advantage is driving us out, ultimately, of our home town: we didn't want to own another "crap shack" at Toronto prices just to rent it out for five years for little return when we could spend a fraction of what we've cleared down the road and make about two-thirds in rental income. The arbitrage wasn't sentimental, either.

On that personal front, while all but about 12 months of my marriage was spent in the sold house, not all the memories I have of it were positive. One of the reasons I have a free hand to sail away today is because my mother, father and only sibling have all died since 2002. There's not a lot holding me here now...my nephews live elsewhere in Ontario, as do my wife's extended family. A lot of friends have, prompted by the increasingly hard logic of overpriced housing, moved away from Toronto. So unmooring in terms of sentimental attachments has been made easier.

Long-haired hippie crew with the infamous cart on its 100th shortcut from Crap Shack to Chateau Nouveau

My wife and son put in Herculean efforts to make this happen: the phrase "worked like a two-dollar mule" was not used figuratively this summer: I thank them both. And now we return to boat-fixing and, I hope, a few sailing expeditions prior to haulout at the end of October. More to follow soon.

Cabin Boy's "back to school" haircut, done at his request.

Return to the floating world

Still to replace: the cracked shut-off hose under the actual sink. It's complex down there.

Behold the (mostly) completed new galley drain. That four-piece AWAB opposing hose-clamp set-up is the apotheosis of belt-and-suspenders sailing, given that it's a ridiculously short piece of hose...but then I was the one who specified a taller pipe nipple, meaning the PVC elbow and the nipple on the Marelon ball valve very nearly meet in the middle. Oh, well. It didn't leak from there on the day.

Still life with bicycle and boat. Yeah, she's a bit hefty, that boat.

The day in question was Saturday, April 28th, cool, windy and frequently rainy. Sub-par in most respects, save that a big push from Mrs. Alchemy (painting a specialt) and myself (wrenching the same) got the job(s) done.

The bottom paint this year was once again Pettit, but of a delightful Hunter Green not unlike the cove stripe (which also got touched up by my fastidious co-skipper. Next year, we grind back to the bare metal in Nova Scotia, but that's a future post.

The new outlet for the head drain is behind the redone caulking for the forward-looking sonar.

There was a little bit of water ingress from the depth transducer last year, so Mrs. Alchemy took charge of "dissolving the old 5200", a stinky and labourious process, and applying "fast cure". She was more careful inside and out than was possible with last year's rushed (and bloody) process, and nothing is leaking as of yesterday's dockside inspection.

"Fire Escape", owned by a fire chief, naturally.

Unlike previous launch days, the crane position dictated we were to go in quite early, as the second boat in the east yard, shortly after 7 AM. It was calm, however, and not yet raining...

The "sling crews" step from boat to boat to do their work.

That fibreglass hull needs a touch more TLC than ours.

The front row of what we call "The Inner Basin" is full of alarmingly large powerboats: Alchemy is far from being big in such company, although at about 15 tonnes, we are not insignificant.

Sling marks obtained!

The head of hair belongs to the owner of the next boat after us.

Note the "cinch belts" holding the slings in place. This keep the slings from "creeping" up the slope of the keel, as I am never sure if my moving things about in the boat all winter has altered the ideal place on which to put the slings in terms of a level hoist.

People never fail to take a step back at this stage. Note the nice job done on the keel bottom. That plate is 3/4" thick.

You can never have too many fenders for this gig.

The lift this year was quick and efficient; compared to the more methodical haulout process, launch is usually faster.

Putting pennants on moorings in better weather earlier in the week. At launch, it was too wet and busy for photos!

After docking, however, I was crewing on the club workboat and we had the highest number of "splashed with dead motor" cases I can recall...so it was a very busy morning on that boat.

Maybe I should shift the sling marks aft a little bit?

Long morning story short, the engine fired instantly (I had done a static test in the cradle the previous day) and we docked without further incident, although there was slight leaking beneath the new Marelon ball valves that needed a bit of tape to cure, no pun intended. I may have to spin them off next fall and be more generous with the pipe dope. As of yesterday, however, the damp has been banished. We will monitor for further issues. The dual exhaust is also, gratifyingly, dual exhausting, and the engine "note" is slightly changed, suggesting that there is, in fact, reduced back pressure.

The benefits of being (nearly) first in is getting an unobstructed beauty shot.

Next up: Manifesting the radar love and readying the mast with new VHF and AIS runs.

Well, that was an eventful month

Warning: This post is both multi-topical and heavy with photos.

Well, I haven't posted for a month, which is historically unusual. This was due to a series of events both fortunate and unfortunate. We went in mid-August twice for a few days away, which in this case involved visiting both friends in Frenchman's Bay and a trip across the lake to visit for the first time the scenic, if tourist-ridden town, of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Frenchman's Bay was fun, if blustery. As seen above, we aren't usually subject to heel at dock, and a fender sacrificed itself on behalf of our paintjob. Crewman Lucas experienced warm if near-oceanic waves, and the lake ate his foolishly-taken-swimming sunglasses.

The next one ate his shades.

The trip back was fine, if (typical of Lake Ontario) the motor was needed were we to get back in time for dinner. I noticed I had passed the 25 hour engine run time mark, and realized I was supposed to change the transmission fluid for the first time. This wasn't recorded photographically, as it was mucky and I needed a third arm. About a litre of ATF (which looked brand-new) missed the bucket and ended up in the aft bilge. This will become important information later.

To the east of Toronto is a long artificial "spit" that's become quite a nature refuge. Also, it means a long diversion to the SW to get back into the harbour.

The high water May-end of July has receded from the club, but that hasn't discourged some unusual visitors. As I am frequently on the boat at odd times, like "middle of the weekdays" depending on my workflow, I see quite a bit of local wildlife not present at busier times. I think this fellow was a witness to the day I put in the new anchor.

Egrets, I've had a few.

A recent mid-week job was the addition of a keyed lock to the companionway door. Yes, I can see the slight gap between frame and lid. It's an easy fix that will happen over the winter. The point is that this door is now somewhat harder to break through.

I mean, a crowbar and a chain clipper will still do the job, but this is meant to discourage, not prevent.

Another trip on the weekend of the recently solar eclipse (70% partial over Lake Ontario) brought us to Niagara-on-the-Lake. We were told we were very lucky in our timing to get a spot on their wall as they were still in "recovery mode" from extensive flooding that had delayed their launch until late July. Their boatyard was still pretty full, suggesting that some people had just given up on the year, which was sad.

Evidence of damage was all over the place, as was evidence of circa four-knot current in the Niagara River. I made good use of our new sounder, and better use of the throttle. I wish I had been clearer on the "don't enter the docks area" warning, however, as it was a very tight turn or three to get out after I learned I was meant to go on the wall (bow to current). But we docked easily and had a good time in town and at the beach.

I'm just guessing here that the bottom drops off like a cliff right behind him. Just to the left are about three sailboats that were rafted up on an anchor, evidence of a big counter-current as they were pointed to the north shore.

The Monday of the eclipse was nearly calm and dead useless for sailing, but quite good for sextant work. The general effect of a partial eclipse (I've been under a few) is like high cirrus cloud: a generalized dimming, but there's no evidence of the moon's "bite" if you glance at it. That takes binoculars!

It begins!

What I choose to call "total partiality".

Lucas, after most reluctantly taking the wheel, because we have yet to install an autopilot and he is even less keen on helming than Mrs. Alchemy, took a break from that "torture" to wield his mother's sextant and check out the progress of the moon.

Sure, welder's glass is cheaper, but not nearly as seamanlike.

Now, during the voyage, the galley drains were acting up a bit and, well, not draining. We weren't sailing and therefore couldn't heel, and I wasn't sure if there was debris in there. In addition, there was a stuck inline valve of this type under the sink as well that wouldn't close. We got back and figuring it out went on the list of "things to check out and/or repair."

Like this and, upon reflection, not great for below-the-waterline use.

The next day, my club's Commodore, Don Weston, and myself went to check out the "Blue Barge" for a failure to start. Well, we got it going, all right, but discovered it either has a cracked block or a failed gasket between the manifold and the block. The first one is a lot worse than the second, which I could fix.

This old motor both propels the Blue Barge, which is used to shift the railcar wheel mooring bases in the mooring field, and, via a power take-off, pumps the hydraulics that work the crane (top of photo). It's a beast, but a useful one.

Hey, foreshadowing! No, seriously, this was bad. It's either an annoying fix or a "do we buy a diesel" fix.

I then had a nice lunch and debated going back to the boat for its 50 hour oil change. When I stepped aboard and opened the engine bay hatch. I was pretty shocked to see it largely filled with water. I was equally shocked to see about a foot of water in the salon.

Alchemy was sinking.

You'll have to excuse my lack of interest in recording photographically either the depth of the water or my robotic response to the crisis. The bilge pump was off, because I had spilled some ATF during the process of changing that fluid and didn't want to pollute my club's basin until I could swab it up by hand.

Well, I got over that instantly. The Rule 3700 worked (it was powered off a subpanel still above water I installed earlier in the year) and, despite being about a metre down gamely pump water up the new hose I had installed recently (I don't post every improvement I made, actually) threw it off the boat. I ran to the club office to get an AC powered "crash pump", a residential-grade sump pump and a length of hose we use for boats that have single, non-SS hose clamps in the head. It took about 20 minutes to get the water out of the engine bay sufficiently to reveal the problem: the galley drain through-hull pipe was weeping vigorously.

As the "crack" was below the seacock, turning it off was of limited use. Self-amalgamating tape was.

I was able to get down onto the slick stringers and hull and stop the leak with plumber's helper tape, or at least reduce it to a drip. Only then could I survey the damage. That's what's kept us busy since the 21st of August, frankly.

Another shot of Groundwater Zero. Yeah, that's all getting repainted shortly.

Firstly was discerning the cause or causes of the nearly fatal leak. The short answer is I can't tell untill we haul out. I arranged to have that done at Toronto Island Marina and to have a new section of pipe welded on at least this side via Andrew Barton, my fabricator and a fellow member at NYC. But that would have involved a tow as the engine suffered damage and the diesel supply was perhaps compromised. Andrew agreed to do the work (he has a day job on the Island and it would have been convenient for him) but suggested that if the tape was working and haulout was seven (now five) weeks away, I could bung a plug into the thru-hull opening and that and the tape should flood proof the boat until haulout and doing a series of weld jobs with Alchemy cradled.

Secondly, because I cannot at this point remove the seacock, I can't confirm what I suspect is the problem: that the pipe threads supporting the seacock seen above have fractured or otherwise cracked. I am not sure if the mechanical forces of attempting to turn the inline valve imparted a shearing force on the pipe stub; or, after 29 years, there was corrosion and it was just "its time"; or (my initial thought) there might have been galvanic corrosion as the boat next to me had had a jury-rigged garden-grade extension cord going to his race boat that I've found more than once in the water on my port side where this outlet is. I have yet to mount flat zincs directly on the hull and all the anodes are on the prop or the rudder. Clearly, that's moving up the list now.

Frankly, I can't point fingers. It could be a combination. I might not even know when we fix it (and its possibly suspect starboard side drain for the head) after haulout. But I'm paranoid now (and the bilge pump is permanently on "auto", the carp be damned, although most of the goo is out of the bilges now), and I'm down there most days. There's no new ingress of water. In fact, once the mopping up was done, the boat's really dry. Still, I bought one of these for myself and it and 25 feet of hose are at the ready should something of the same nature present itself to me again:

It's merely supplemental. The Rule 3700 can throw three times the amoutn overboard, but it will give me time to think and I can run it off the inverter if I must.

The Commodore is also keen on not seeing members' boats sink: apparently, the paperwork is horrendous, so as he had a few dive jobs scheduled, I offered to crew and he graciously offered to bung the offending pipe. The hope is that "bung plus tape plus vigilance" will keep us afloat until more permanent and presumably stronger steps can be taken.

Note the ramp and the diving ladder. The Commodore picked these attributes and they are damned handy.

The club's able workboat, Storm King, was lashed aside in the late morning (best light for this job). I  gave directions as to which hole to bung. I had purchased a special foam bung as seen on the right. Id clipped the end as I knew the interior diameter was 1.5 inches, but Don reported that too much of it would protrude to guarantee it would stay put. So that was put aside and a more traditional "tapered softwood bung" (on the left) was given to him. This was smacked into place and, I hope, will do the trick.

A tale of two bungs. Really, I think the one on the right is better pushing into a hole from the inside than the other way around.

Diving for bungs is less romantic than diving for pearls, and there's no use wearing nice shoes on a greasy boat.

The list of what was damaged is sort of good news, bad news: The new depthsounder is fine, but the starter motor was fried and gave only the "click/hum of death" when keyed. More on that below. Mercifully, the battery boxes worked as designed and the house bank was untouched by water. The interior carpet was wrecked (except for the head sole, which never got wet) and is gone. And the Nova Kool refrigeration compressor, a Danfoss BF35 unit, got wet and is non-functional. But really, these problems are dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars, not "fetch the salvage barge". It could have been much worse. Like "hurricane hole" worse.

What worse looks like.

As I had mentioned, I was on a mission when I discovered the flooding to change the oil as I had surpassed by six hours the recommended initial change interval of 50 hours. Well, I expected to find a 'grey milkshake' of watery oil and perhaps a need to do several kerosene flushes, as I had been done this road, sadly, before with a duff waterlift with the old Westerbeke W-52 engine pre-2011. But it appears that my new diesel's gaskets are still tight, because the "used" 50 hour crankcase oill was the colour of night, as it should have been. There was zero evidence of water. Same for the transmission fluid. In these respects, we got very lucky.

Healthy and black. The next oil change isn't until 350 hours on the clock. That's probably going to be in Halifax.

Back to the starter. The corrosion seen here was also evident on the starter battery and its associated cabling and fuses, some of which I can likely salvage. The battery was fully submerged, yet when I took it off the boat yesterday (we are going for a full paint job down there before water tanks go in), it still read 12.75 VDC. It's old (about six years) and I'm going to scrap it anyway in favour of a different setup; more on that later, but it's still impressive to me that it didn't completely discharge.

 

Yeah, not great. The good news was that I cut back that cable and the interior was perfect, suggesting that my power lug crimping and heatshrinking technique is pretty waterproof.

Back at the block, I took the starter off and figured out my next steps. As I found with July's farcical filter fiasco, it pays to do one's research. I learned a great deal about this starter: it's a common 12 VDC, 2KW nine-toothed CW starter used in a variety of Beta Marine diesels, namely the 43, 50 and 60 HP models. Meaning also that it's used in a variety of Kubota backhoes, diggers and tractors.

Now, I checked out the prices for this item from the English Beta Marine site. It goes for £164.95, or about $270 Canadian. Ouch. Still, she doesn't spin without it, which is a case for decompression levers, I suppose.

As above, so blown: That wire and plug is a 40 amp circuit going to the wiring harness and then to the key on the panel

So my first and somewhat cynical stop was the nearest Beta Marine parts dealer, Craig Morley, who advised me that as he would just have to order the thing from the main Beta parts dealer in Canada, out in British Columbia, I would do better to source it locally via a Kubota dealer. Thanks, Craig. You could have just sold me one and cost me a lot of money. You just went to first place in my "surveyor" list.

Just to cover my bases, however, I phoned B.C. and got a price for this Beta starter, which is actually a Kubota starter, which is actually a Denso starter. I was quoted a price of $1,700 Canadian. Plus shipping and this is a fairly chunky item. Yikes.

Before opening this up, I realized someone had been a touch lazy with the "Betatastic" paint job.

I called a Kubota dealer out by the airport. I was quoted $701 Canadian. Well, a grand better. Let's keep it up. Meanwhile, I poured out the water and dried off the guts. Craig had suggested the sooner I did that, the more likely I would be able to have it repaired.

The coils and brushes inside were cruddy, but the rest was easily cleaned.

So I did two things: 1) I ordered a new starter, minus the key circuit, which is a small mod, from the States. Cost to me? $264.32 U.S., including shipping. It arrives tomorrow. It will be, once modified, the spare starter and will be bagged and tagged to avoid this in the future. I was going to do that anyway...2) I took the drowned starter to a reputable local starter rebuilder place.

Unusually for my life, this was downtown and not in south Etobicoke or Mississauga. Most convenient!

They turned it around over the weekend, although with a new look; evidently, they paint everything they rebuild. Cost to me? $160 Canadian. Well, well.

NICE!

Being careful, I tried to tighten all the bolts. They were all tight. I am well-pleased.

About 20 minutes of reinstallation later, the engine started. Yay! Of course, because I don't yet know whether there's water in the keel tanks, I stopped the engine right away. But we're back, baby!

As a side task, and because I was swabbing out the forepeak workshop which took on some water via a limber hole I will keep plugged on passage, I emptied much of the forepeak, dried it out, and removed two surplus anchors and about 250 kilos of "trim ballast" in the form of lead shot in thick, taped-up plastic bags. This was orignally in place to keep the bow on its proper lines with a) different engine and b) two 100 gallon water tanks aft of the mast and c) a couple of Trojan T-105s as the house bank. Now there's a new 30 kilo anchor out in front, six L-16s under the mast, loads more tools and stores and the tanks, when they go in, will be smaller (probably about 400 litres over two tanks) plus the weight of a watermaker system. The effect was noticeable. And now my garage has a lot of scrap metal potential.

Having that bobstay/snubber plate proud of the water hasn't happened for some time. I like it.

Now, there is still a lot of trim ballast left in the form of several 50 kilo lead ingots on either side of the collision bulkhead. Plenty to move around as and if needed, but as I move gear/spares forward and stores lower, they may need further shifting.

The last significant damage was the fridge compressor. I have it disconnected at the moment as I have to replace some wires before I can determine if it just shorted (and I can find the fuse on the PDF I found of its wiring) or is shot.

You can see where the water went: that rusty four-screw terminal is the DC power hookup.

The "muffin fan" is easily replaced, but I have to do yoga to get two hands in here to finish the job. Fingers crossed, because it's a pretty effective unit and if we ran it at more than 2 out of 7, stuff in the fridge section would freeze, even on hot days. Also, they aren't cheap. So we'll see. I think I will reroute the DC supply above the base up that back wall (which is actually part of the bench seating over lockers) and put in an inline fuse suited to the 10 ga. that's supplying the compressor.

Worth saving, I hope.

Thanks for reading this tale of woe mitigated by less woe. This was bad, but not voyage-endangering.