LED Replacement Blubs
We’ve made the move to LEDs in all of our ceiling fixtures (not on dimmers) and have seen a big savings in power draw and a decrease in heat generation. The G4 wafer replacements install with little effort (make sure you get the Warm bulbs). However, the first bulbs we found for the reading lamps were “flood light” style heavy bulbs. They worked, but not as appealing as the ceiling replacements. Now we see a new IMTA replacement that is a much better, and cheaper option. Nice light and less bulky. Here’s a link to price shop.
Read MoreManatee Movie
We often mention manatees in our posts about the Banana River because they are visible year-round. Today I managed to catch one on video! I shot this footage after we got back from getting fuel this morning, as we were hosing off the fender covers on the dock.
The manatee starring in this movie (click here to watch) took a shine to the dripping water and treated it as his own personal wet-bar.
Coming up to see what the dripping is about...
The reverse roll is much more efficient for catching drips!
Don’t forget to watch the movie (click here to watch)!
Read More
Painted, Waxed, and Packed for the Bahamas
Where do you go with a newly painted bottom, a freshly detailed hull and superstructure, and a trawler that’s been buffed and waxed all over? The Bahamas, of course! Seadee is back in the water and looking better than ever! Bound for South Florida tomorrow, then the Bahamas as soon as the weather looks favorable. Follow us on our SPOT (also at the top under “Follow Our Progress”) or just watch the website for new posts periodically.
It's hard to make a Great Harbour look petite -- but look: I've done it! You just need a 100MT travel lift.
Look at how it gleams in the morning sun! That's 42,000 lbs of shininess right there!
This is so typical: you get your boat waxed, a new boot stripe put on (the old one was sand, new one is navy), and the first day back in the water some manatee comes up and slobbers all over the side! This guy thought the raw water being cycled through the AC system tasted pretty good on a balmy morning. (The black at the top of the photo is the hefty rub rail.)
Read More
Such Upgrades!
It may seem like Seadee has been sitting at the dock, but oh no! It has been busy with a bevy of important upgrades from the flybridge to the engine room and from the master cabin to the salon, there is much new and notable to share.
This Airmar PB200 Weatherstation, mounted on the flybridge arch, gives us the real-time and trending wind info for Seadee at all times. It also serves as another (redundant) GPS.
This new Garmin GMI 10 screen on the salon helm shows anything we want on the boat's NMEA 2000 network; here we're looking at apparent wind on the boat. As another example, we like to use it as a split screen showing depth and wind while underway for quick reference.
This independent Garmin GPSmap 441 mounted in the master cabin serves several purposes: it acts as our anchor alarm, it doubles as our dinghy Garmin, and it allows us to see info from the boat's NMEA 2000 network while lazing around in bed. If you don't understand the value of lazing around in bed, try consulting a woman.
To solve our barnacle and seachest debris problem, we had sea strainers installed on all working seacocks. Shown here are the engine and generator strainers (and yes we have already had to empty them). We plan to have the seachest screen removed at Seadee's next hauling.
The air conditioning pump was relocated to the stringer inside the engine room (port side), accommodating its own sea strainer and a more succinct hose structure.
As proof that the barnacles here are of a vicious variety, this turtle was caught napping and has picked up a few on his shell. Good luck with that, buddy!
This is a gratuitous manatee photo. You have no idea the patience it took Annie to get this photo, since the manatee was asleep at the time.
Spiffy Dinghy!
After much use and abuse, Bonus Track (Seadee’s dinghy) went in for some well-deserved repairs. A new hull-plate was added so that Annie can beach it without tearing up the hull as much, as well as new Caribe labels for the sides. An overall spiffing and several hull repairs took place, as well as many other things you don’t care about. The point is that Bonus Track (the dinghy) is now back, better than ever, and possibly the fastest dinghy to grace the flybridge of an N37!
A removable Garmin mounted on the console means this dinghy need never be lost again, and a handy radio holster mounted on the inside of the steering column makes the handheld radio easier to hear and less likely to bounce out.
Slightly easier to dock than the trawler, Andy is piloting this craft with expert precision.
Once again gracing the flybridge, Bonus Track is perched atop its cradles. Notice that it is tied down both by its bow and stern-- we find this can be helpful for keeping the dinghy up on the flybridge during exciting seafaring voyages.
Barnacle overload in the Sea Chest
Every now and then, Seadee manages to create a problem that nobody anticipated. This fall we started noticing an ever-more aggressive coating of barnacles inside the sea chest. Now, let’s not blame this on lack of sea chest maintenance, because we’re in there scraping the sea chest constantly just like everybody else. And the sea chest has been painted with ablative paint, recently (i.e. this summer when the boat was hauled), and paint is still visible so it’s not a lack of proper painting that’s the culprit. The hull of the boat, along with the bottom of the sea chest screen, are scraped regularly by a diver and kept free of barnacles. Got any other ideas?
Here is the captain's arsenal of normal sea chest maintenance; all have been affixed to long dowels to reach deep into the bottom of the sea chest.
How about killer mammoth barnacles? These things are friggin’ huge. They sneak in as little baby barnacles and get scraped off the first few times (presumably) but after a few weeks they morph into thumb-sized (not exaggerating here) impellar-eating killer barnacles. This is the stuff of trawler owner nightmares…que the scary music.
So the scene is set. We have a bumper crop of XXL barnacles in the sea chest and one day our fair captain goes down to do his routine maintenance on the engine room (at the dock). After all the sea chest sides are scraped, the barnacle debris falls to the screen at the bottom of the sea chest and…just sits there. The debris is too big to fall through. Unfortunately there is a LOT of debris, over 1″ deep on top of the screen. Now, I’m nut sure how carefully you’ve thought about the consequence of turning on your engines, generator, or air conditioner pump with an undetermined amount of razor-sharp barnacle debris sitting at the bottom of your sea chest, but suffice to say if is highly inadvisable if you plan on using that motor again in the near future.
We tried scooping the barnacles out; that failed because the sea chest screen is set too deep into the boat to reach from the engine room. We tried releasing the screen from the outside (via diver); that failed because the screws holding the screen in are too far up inside the sea chest to be accessed by diver. We tried poking the screen out; that’s one strong screen. It was suggested several times that we pour various and sundry mixtures of very strong acids or bases down into the sea chest, but since all the advice we got seemed to contradict itself and we could find little scientific evidence to address this problem, we were reluctant.
In the end, we solved this barnacle overload with the following: 2″ flexible PVC pipe (8′) stuck down into the bottom of the sea chest, attached to a 3/4 HP Pool Pump (self priming), attached to another 20′ of 2″ flexible PVC pipe which stretched out of the engine room and overboard. The key was that the pool pump had a leaf strainer on the front of the pump which trapped the nearly 5 cups of barnacle debris that we pumped out of the sea chest. This method worked like a charm, and it took all of 3 minutes, but took a while to set-up.
Now the sea chest is clean and happy; and we can once again start the engines, generator, and air conditioning, which is useful.
This is the 3/4 HP pool pump (self priming) that we used to strain and pump the water from the sea chest overboard. When it started up it really pumped! The leaf trap (barnacle trap) is at the left side of the pump.
This is the flexible 2" diameter PVC hose that we attached to the pump. This length went into the sea chest and a 20' section pumped the water overboard.
This is about 1/2 of the "barnacle winnings" that we pumped out of the sea chest using our pump set-up. This is a 5 gallon bucket, so it's a substantial amount; the barnacles had been pulverized already by our scraping. Click to enlarge the picture, if you are into gross stuff.
Quick Visit to Trawlerfest
Seadee had to stay at the dock in Merritt Island, but we drove down to Trawlerfest in Ft. Lauderdale for a quick peek at the trawlering world’s latest innovations. We liked the NMEA 2000 equipment and the screens available from Maretron; they appear to integrate with the Garmin equipment, as a bonus. The Coastal Explorer software had a new version being demonstrated with some interesting upgrades, including dual screens with radar overlay (available with radar upgrade package) and Active Captain content which is available sans internet connection.
We were a little downhearted to see that the only HD TV options from DirectTV are the 24″ dish (which is huge looking in person) with no plans to bring a smaller version on the market, so it looks like Seadee will be staying in the regular-D for the foreseeable future, unless we want to raise our air draft about a foot or switch to Dish Network (probably not happening). Also, we looked at some cool snubbers from QuickLine (bridles, singles, etc) and decided to try ours which is a single and uses the bow eye for now. We just got it assembled thanks to Wink’s braiding of the line for us on Thursday night of Trawlerfest. More reports on the snubber after testing.
And of course there were trawlers. Fast trawlers (yes, they do make them), regular trawlers, slower-than-usual trawlers, really big trawlers (we saw 60′), really small trawlers (adorable little tug boat which came in a 29′), and many versatile solutions for modern living on the water. We saw what we think may be the ugliest catamaran on the high seas, and some very handsome boats, but none we liked better than our fair Seadee.
We also saw our friend Wink, Captain of GH47 JOHN HENRY, who was at Trawlerfest showing and selling his boat.
Andy in front of the Bahia Mar Beach Resort where Trawlerfest was held. If Andy has on a coat, it is too cold to swim in the ocean.
This is an unusual picture of Annie at the Beach -- note the ski jacket.
Merritt Island Weather
