Since we don't have phone or net access, I guess we just look for things to get into!
I know this sounds like I am making it all up, but I'm NOT, I swear!
We washed the boat down this morning to get the salt off of everything. Then, we got the folding bikes out and patched a hole in the front tire on one of the bikes and headed off to coffee shop with WIFI so we could check mail and weather and put up another posting on the blog. We got some nice photos of the river from up on the bridge...
David's deli is great, Janell served us, magenta hair lots of tatoos! Kira the smiling face! After coffee we rode the bikes in towards Fort Bragg and decided we were not dressed for the ride. It got a little cold so we came back.
We did get a photo of the bay where we anchored coming in!
And a scale rendition of Hajime in the bay!!!
We met the owner of f/v Blackhawk in slip next to us, Jim, who told us it was a good crab season, went up to office to see harbor master Jerry. Jerry's wife works in office too, Jenie. They have one worker, Jeff. Jeff helped us, Jim and Jess, get 10 gal of fuel today... We, Jeff and Jim, will get another 10 gal. tomorrow, maybe 15 gal. tomorrow we have another 5 gal can in the boat we can use! You may recall we have to slep the fuel in for ourselves since the fuel dock closed this year!
One more thing on the list for this stop was to get the bosun's chair out and haul Jess up to unwind the radar reflector that got snarled up on the trip up from Bodega Bay.
The bosun's chair is stored under almost everyting else in the aft/starboard lazarette. Out the stuff came, in went Jim and he saw some sparkling stuff that looked like gold dust on the top of the battery box cover. After the initial excitement of feeling really lucky for discovering the alchemical formula for turning boat into gold wore off we got a flashlight and looked for the source of the gold dust!
Oh, we did get the chair out for going up the mast to un-tangle the radar reflector.
Directly above the battery box is the Edson stearing binical. There are two pulleys that turn the stearing cables from vertical to horizontal. Vertical the cables go up to the boats steering wheel. Horizontal the cables go aft to the steering quadrant. ( the quadrant is the wheel on top of the rudder shaft which is rotated through a series of pullys and cables attached to the stearing wheel of the vessel)
Seems that one of the brass pins used for the pulley shaft was wearing in its stainless steel support bracket. I have to check and see if the original design has been modified by a prior owner of the vessel? I have a feeling that the shafts should be stainless since the pullys are forged bronze with pressed in oilless bronze bushings. Running a bronze bushing on a brass shaft seems WRONG. Engineering thing! I will research soon as I can. We will pick up a couple 3/8" diameter 2" long stainless pins for boat stores just in case. The slip fit may be a bit loose too, looks like .378 shaft outside diameter and .380 bushing inside diameter. But all I have on the boat is a dial caliper, not the best tool for checking diameters!
In the meantime. We just happened to have a piece of 3/8" diameter brass rod shaft material on board from a prior fabrication project involving the rudder pintle on the sailing dingy "Mate".
We cut a 2 inch pin from the 3/8" diameter rod and drilled a couple cotter pin holes in the ends of the shaft. Filed the rough edges and had a pin pretty much identical to the failed pin... We replaced the pulley and tightened up the stearing cables and we are back in business.
Checking the pins and pullys is now on the pre-sail checklist.
I'm not making this stuff up!
After we put everything away Jim hauled Jess up the mast in the bosun's chair and we did the the radar reflector un-tangled!
Just another day on s/v HAJIME.
One long a__ day, beer time!
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