Blogging is so difficult for me. What’s changed in the last bit? Quite a bit:

  1. Sailed on the Baja-Haha 2022 to Cabo
  2. Had the boat repainted in January in Puerto Vallarta
  3. Sailed south from PV to Ixtapa
  4. Worked my way back north, now in Morro Bay

But right now I’m stuck in Morro Bay due to lousy winds and sea conditions. Looks like things might improve over the next few days, but we’ll see!

Jane’O has a few problems:

  1. The starboard fuel tank has a leak somewhere near the bottom. I’m not super surprised by this since these stainless steel tanks are subject to crevice corrosion if they have any salt water around them. Some weld probably failed somewhere. Replacing this tank will be really hard, probably involving removing the engine! In the meantime, I ran some fuel lines over from the port tank. Not ideal, but it works for now.
  2. There is some salt in the fresh water cooling system of the starboard engine. I suspect there is a small leak in the heat exchanger. I’m going to need to order a new heat exchanger element and hope that fixes the problem.
  3. The port engine alternator has quit. I changed it to an external regulator and I guess that was just too much for it. I rebuilt it and am working on having it tested again.
  4. The chartplotter’s support ball broke on passage. After replacing it, I ended out letting the chartplotter slam down and it cracked. Very sad. It still works, but I will need to repair it at a crazy high expense, almost the cost of a new chartplotter. I’m debating just buying a 7” for an inside chartplotter somewhere near the nav desk.

Otherwise, no major problems. As usual, a lot of things were fixed and enhanced recently:

  1. Membranes replaced on watermaker. The PPM was slowly rising over time, and these membranes really only last a few years. Getting those guys out was REALLY HARD due to the corrosion of the aluminum end caps. I recently found out that other watermakers (i.e. Spectra) call their end caps “wear items”, so I guess it’s okay that these had some trouble. I purchased a few new ones, only to find out that the real issue was the membranes were shot. Having a few spare end caps doesn’t make me feel bad though.
  2. I added digital valves for each water tank, so I can open and close them remotely. This ended out causing some issues with air getting into the low side, which I think are all now fixed. I think I fried my water pump though. My next project is a way to manually dial up or down the water pressure. I think this isn’t too hard, with an arduino, a remote pressure sensor, a dial (potentiometer) to adjust the pressure to what I want. I think running with 20psi most of the time while underway is a good compromise and will save a lot of water underway.

Anyway, hope to blog more as I continue north.