Rust & Sludge & Grossness - Oh My!

Shalom shalom to all those kind souls near and far who are following progress of the M/V Sephina:

This week saw major progress towards hitting the water.

We cleaned and polished the hull above the waterline (the blue part) so it wouldn't look so tatty, but there are still lots of chips, areas where runoff has eroded the paint, etc. So while it looks significantly better, its still not thrilling. They can't match paint colors at the local hardware store, but I did discover a half gallon of old blue paint for the hull. Since we have so little, we have to be strategic about where we apply it. I began to remove the old name from the transom, but it takes the underlying blue right with it. So we'll reserve the paint to recover the transom and the forward hull identifiers, and if there's any left over after that, we'll hit the eroded paint under the forward scuppers, which look pretty rugged.

The major work this week was the fuel system. I tore into it this week in earnest. First I spent a full day diagramming all the fuel lines, return lines, etc. 

There are four fuel tanks - two large midships tanks port and starboard, an aft tank, and a forward tank (there used to be five - a small fuel tank in the forepeak, but that was sacrificed about 20 years ago to make room for the bow thruster). One of the locals here in the yard told me that there was a diesel leak coming from the boat and that the former owners, who were running her for charter, were kicked out of Icy Strait and Elfin Cove because of it. (DIscharge of oil or diesel is strictly prohibited and illegal.) That put the nail in the coffin of their failing business. Don't know if that's true, all kinds of stories whirl around, and I don't see evidence of a fuel leak. It is true that I can't easily visualize the forward and after tanks, but the two main midships tanks are easily accessible from the ER and they look fine. So I will only be pulling from those two tanks for now. 

Then I inspected the whole system. Most of the lines are galvanized steel, and one particular section looked extremely crusty (and rusty), so I cut it out and replaced it with new pipe. Then I attacked the fuel filters. Each tank has a Racor FS200 fuel filter and water separator; the main supply line filter is a Dahl 300 fuel filter and water separator, and then there yet is another fuel filter on the engine.

There are dozens of replacement filters/filter cartridges of various types stored on the boat, so I also catalogued them to see what I have, etc. I suspect that half or more of them are to equipment no longer on the boat. (Maybe I'll hold a filter yard sale haha.) I also found a 1970's style sealed beam headlight, haven't seen one of those for decades! I was about to chuck it, and then I realized that it might be for the searchlight, so I set it aside.

The fuel filters were absolutely filthy, I mean unusably filthy. The Dahl in particular was half filled with water, and the other half with sludge and rust. What a mess. There is no way an engine would run with fuel coming through that filter.

Also, there is a fuel transfer pump built in to the system to transfer fuel between tanks to maintain trim, etc. It doesn't work, but I think it's because it pulls 12 volts from the genset starting battery, which has to be replaced. Once that's operable, I'd like to transfer all the fuel in the port tank to the starboard tank, open the inspection port and clean out any water, algae, mold and any other garden-variety schmutz from the pick ups at the bottom of the tank. The reverse the process and do the same for the other tank.

With clean filters, new lines, clean tanks, and help from Above, the engine should run just fine. We'll see after Shabbat.

In the ongoing plumbing wars, I managed to open the shower drain so it doesn't back up now. That drain line is the common drain for all the gray water (showers and head sinks) so hopefully all those will drain freely now. The gray water dumps to a holding tank with a bilge pump to pump it overboard. But the holding tank lid is open, the bilge pump is inoperable (of course) so for now the gray water is overflowing right into the bilge and is pumped out from there. No big deal; this is a minor problem I can fix down the road.

The galley sink drain was another matter. In theory it is supposed to dump directly overboard. But it was clogged and nothing seemed to help. Since the galley drain line runs along the headliner in the ER, I took out my handy dandy die grinder and cut the 1-1/2" galvanized steel pipe. The sludge and rust that I dug out was so impacted that no amount of snaking or NaOH was going to fix it. Patched it all up and lo and behold! runs great now.

So yeah, what plumbing issues remain seem to be more on the discharge side, not the supply side, so we're making progress.

Once the engine and genset are running, we can schedule our launch. Stay tuned.

Shabbat Shalom from the Last Frontier's last frontier - Hoonah, Alaska.