Lee’s Landing, Lake Union, Seattle, Wa, 7-Aug-2019 – We haven’t left on our shakedown and won’t until next week, it seems. We may instead sail around Puget sound for a bunch of days until we’re confident everything is good and then take off without coming back to the Lee’s.
Yesterday, while I worked on trim in the cabin, Harrison installed the ‘‘zinc’’ on the propeller shaft*. When he came up, he said that one of the screws that holds in the propeller shaft bearing (cutlass bearing), was hanging from the wire that keeps the screws from loosening.
First response is, Yikes. Second response is, how can the screw come out without turning?
Looking closely at the screw, it is tapered, and it shouldn’t be. This leads me to believe the screw was never screwed in properly, perhaps an adhesive was used, but nonetheless, only one screw holds in the bearing.
After the panic subsided, we came up with a plan of how to get the boat out of the water and what yards might do the work – my panic was high in that I considered letting someone else do the work.
In the middle of the night, it came to me that I’ll fill the hole with JB-Weld, drill, tap and reinstall the screw. JB Weld takes 24 hours to cure and we should be back in the water on the third day.
Everything else is going well, though with the normal frustrations, which I do not deal well with. Neither the windows nor the new jib sheet tracks leak. We’re reinstalling the headliner. The good and new and wonderful news is that Jennifer, the lovely and amazing, scrubbed the panels, while they were out of the boat with a bleach and detergent solution and the panels came clean enough to reinstall without recovering.
All else looks good. We need time without doing physical labor to get all our charts and satellite electronics set up.
I need to finish buying the other things we need: a survival enclosure for the Portland Pudgy, we need a second waterproof tablet, a light sensing anchor light… yes, the list is unending. It looks like about $3K, plus the haul out.
We still want to be off the dock by the 19th, if not on our way, then sailing and testing.
* A zinc is a sacrificial piece. The different metals and minerals in a boat and sea water form a battery of sorts. The current will cause metals to turn into salts and dissolve. Zinc is more reactive than other metals used on a boat and dissolves first.
