GroupWBench

The weather has been kind to Texas so far this Spring. We’ve had cooler weather and some rain that has made things grow like crazy. I mentioned to Ivy that it felt more like the way everything came back to life in North Carolina every spring than central Texas.

We have taken a bunch of passengers out sailing lately. There were six people on board a week ago in strong enough winds that we were ripping up and down the lake. They were all friends from the marina with their own sailboats, so we obviously had to have problems getting out of the slip. It is always difficult to back out and turn up the slipway when the wind is out of the Southwest. That is what we ran into when Ivy was dumped into the water, plus we’ve had difficulties (getting blown sideways down the slipway) a couple of other times as well.  This time, our dock neighbor ran around to the far dock and pushed us off to get us going when we got stuck. Nothing like having a knowledgeable audience to guarantee a goat rope.

We also participated in the club’s membership drive disguised as a free intro to sailing course and took out a passenger for an afternoon on the lake. Fortunately that trip went well, up to a point.

Things went sideways as we were putting up the boat. I stuck my head down to close the engine seacock and noticed water dripping. As I was basically standing on my head peering into the dark bowels of the boat, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. But when I lowered myself in to the lazarette, I saw that the stuffing box where the propeller shaft goes through the back of the boat was dripping a lot. I know that a stuffing box is supposed to drip a single little drop once every minute or so. What I was seeing was a constant drip, drip, drip. Any faster and it would have been a stream coming out.

I spent some time that evening doing a bit of research to figure out exactly what a stuffing box is, how one works, and how to fix one that was dripping too much. Since I don’t know the last time the graphite impregnated flax stuffing that holds the lake out but lets the shaft turn was changed, I didn’t know if I could just tighten the nut a little and be completely good.

 The next morning I folded myself up underneath the cockpit and, using a new pipe wrench I had to go buy and the old one I brought I loosened the locknut and then tightened the stuffing nut by hand. I was semi-high from the fumes from the penetrating lubricant spray I used to free the locknut and was cramping from the awkward position I was braced  in as I waited for the next drip…65 seconds later it came. The next one was at 64 seconds and it leveled out there. I figured that was good enough and struggled the lock nut in position. Before declaring success, I ran the engine in forward and reverse a bit. The shaft turned easily enough and didn’t heat up. When I turned it all off, the drips were running at between a 62 and 65 second interval. That is good enough for right now.

Since I don’t know when the stuffing box was last stuffed, I’ll order new stuffing and hold my breath, cross my fingers, and redo the whole thing so that I don’t end up damaging my shaft with too tight or worn out stuffing. Also coming is a new bilge pump. The list is long and the powers that be seem to know when an item comes off the list. It seems as if there are always two new ones for every  one that gets finished. We discovered a pulpit stanchion that wasn’t welded to the base that is screwed in to the deck. There doesn’t look like any easy fix there.