Back in the Water

It seemed as if it was never going to stop raining, but eventually we got a dry weekend and I hitched the boat to the back of my Taurus, towed it to Poca and launched. Everything went well, except for a tendency to turn left. I must have misadjusted the trim tab when I reinstalled it. There was also a problem with the speedometer which turned out to be a loose connection to the pitot tube. The tubing that connects the pitot to the speedometer had shrunk over the years. I could force it back in place, but it would pop right back off. I cut the tubing a few inches above the pitot and inserted an automotive vacuum hose splice fitting that I happened to have on hand. This gave me the extra quarter inch or so that I needed to get it to stay in place. 

We had company for Independence Day weekend and gave lots of boat rides. The river was still too muddy and debris filled to do any tubing. My wife, Laura, had taken a trip in a cruise ship with her mother and sister in early June and she brought back some of those wrist-band anti-seasick thingamajigs. My sister Mary, who had previously been reluctant to ride in the boat because of her motion sickness put them on and went out with us. To her surprise, they worked and she enjoyed her ride.

I have a neighbor, Bud Turner, a few houses up river from me who puts on a big to-do on the fourth with an impressive fireworks display in the evening. We boated up to his house and watched the show from mid-river.

 The town of Saint Albans had their fireworks show on Saturday the fifth, in conjunction with their River Fest, so we boated up there for another dose that evening. There were lots of boats in the river and I kept the engine at idle and kept busy trying to hold my position and avoid traffic. I should have just anchored off to the side like a lot of other people, but I'd never used my anchor and was skeptical of trying to learn how to use it with a boat full of guests in the middle of a crowd of other boats. I took the boat out the following day and practiced anchoring so I wouldn't find myself in that situation again.

The starting problem had reappeared a couple of times,  and that Saturday morning after the fourth it stayed bad long enough to do some troubleshooting. I found that no power was getting to the starter motor. 

There are two relays, or solenoids, in my starting system. There's a big one, the size of a soda can, piggybacked on the starter motor that moves the starting gear into place in addition to supplying power to the starter motor. The other one is smaller and supplies power to the big solenoid when the key is turned to the starting position. The little solenoid turned out to be the problem, which was a relief considering the price of a new starter. Rather than try to find a replacement on a holiday weekend, I disassembled the solenoid by drilling out the rivets that hold the mounting plate on and cutting off the crimp connectors on the wires that connect the external terminals to the coil windings. After getting inside, I found the contacts to be severely corroded. I cleaned them up and reassembled the solenoid, using a solder joint to replace the crimp connections for the coil windings. It worked nicely, but I went ahead and bought a proper replacement from WV Marine a few days later and installed it.

The next Saturday, the twelfth, I changed out the zinc anodes to try to keep corrosion from setting in again. I'd had the boat in the water for three or four weeks by then and I wanted to see if the zincs were insulating themselves as they had done previously. I also needed to get the trim tab adjusted to straighten out the left turning tendency. To save myself the trouble of taking the boat out of the water, I went up river to a place where there's a sandy bank and tied off there so I could work on the drive unit while standing in knee deep water. I put the clean trim tab on and angled it a little farther in the clockwise (as viewed from the top) direction.

The anodes that I took off were discolored, but weren't completely insulated yet. They were getting resistive, though, and depending on where I put the meter probes I could measure anywhere from a few hundred ohms to several megohms. There was no visible corrosion on the drive, which supports my theory that the anodes will protect the drive for a while before eventually becoming electrically insulated and ineffective. Of course, part of my corrosion reduction could be attributed to the better paint job so my results are still not conclusive, but the theory sounds plausible enough.

One Sunday afternoon in July, Laura was visiting her mother and the boys were into other things, so I took the boat back up the Coal River in Saint Albans and went past the point where Laura and I had gone the previous year. My niece, Angie, lives on the Coal and I found her house just a little past where we had turned back. The river is very shallow at that point and I met a coworker, Mike Henley, who was there on his jet ski. I asked him about the depth and he stepped off the jet ski into water that was just a little above his ankles. I waded ashore, tied the boat off to a tree and had a brief visit with my niece. I had taken it slowly on the way there and after seeing how shallow the water was, I was even more cautious on the way out. Mike told me that there used to be barge traffic on the Coal and that there was a channel, but it's a little hard to find it nowadays. I saw a lot of people in bigger boats than mine going up and down the Coal River at high speed, but I had plenty of time and didn't want to take chances so I just putted along listening to the NASCAR race at Pocono on my radio. 

Next: Propeller Trouble

Index