Monte Gets a Pick-Me-Up

January 22, 2019 Day 110 Noon Position: 45 38S 108 29E Course(t)/Speed(kts): E 5 Wind(t/tws): WxS 11 Sea(t/ft): W 3 Sky: Flat gray 10ths Cloud Cover: 10 Bar(mb): 1028 Cabin Temp(f): 59 Water Temp(f): 48 Relative Humidity(%): 60 Sail: Twins poled full Noon-to-Noon Miles Made Good (nm): 133 Miles since departure: 15,383 Avg. Miles/Day: 140 Days since Cape Horn: 53 Miles since Cape Horn: 7,749 Avg. Miles/Day: 146 Longitude Degrees Made Good (degrees minutes): 3 11 Total Longitude Made Good Since Cape Horn (degrees minutes): 175 46 Avg. Long./Day: 3.32 Wind went light overnight. I woke to sails slatting gently on a small sea. A full moon. Cloud seen only as an erasure of stars. The morning lumed flat gray; rain in the distance never approached. Wind had moved west after coffee. Mo unfolded her wings. Today, as weather was finally subdued and the sea, quiet, I employed my Monte jury-rig and with success. Mo is the perfect boat for what I am doing, but she does have her idiosyncrasies. One is that her rudder is very large and her tiller, rather short. This means that steering her requires more power than a boat with a different steering arrangement. Upshot: Monte, the Monitor Windvane, works harder on Mo than he might on your boat. One effect of this work is that two bushings in Monte’s pinion assembly have worn out, or to be more specific, have worn away, as I found today when I attempted to replace them (see photo of a new bushing next to all that was left of an old one). 

These blue, low friction, cylindrical sleeves, separate the big stainless steel pin on which hangs the water paddle, from the frame, and they bear the weight of force created by the water paddle as it steers Mo 24/7. To be fair to these sleeves, Monitor does recommend a rebuild of the non-metal parts in the unit every 15,000 miles, a number most cruisers would take two to three years to rack up and which we surpassed in 108 days. I’ve done a few such rebuilds. It’s a pleasant afternoon’s work if you are in a marina. But out here, it’s a challenge. The whole assemble has to come apart and be brought into the cabin, and the chances for dropping a key piece in the drink are great. The safest way to go about it is to remove the entire frame into the cabin. It’s a project. So, for days, I’ve been noodling a way to get a new sleeve into position without taking anything apart, and I think I was successful today. The job, as it turns out, was simple. Cut off the flanges from a new bushing, sand it’s edges smooth; insert it in the back of the pinion assembly, and then lash a new bushing over the top as a cap to hold the flange-less bushing in place. Monte was back on the job in an hour, and his pinion assembly is, once again, nicely snug. Hopefully that job buys us another 15,000 miles. — While up in the wee hours, I noticed that the Watt and Sea hydrogenerator wasn’t charging. It’s inverter glowed yellow, not the typical purple that says amps are going into the battery. Yellow. Bad color. My heart seized. I’ve come to rely heavily on this device, but unlike Monte, it’s not something I know how to repair. In this case, it was just barnacle encrusted kelp that had wrapped the propeller and stopped it spinning. One and a half circumnavigations this device has seen, and that’s the first time it’s caught on weed.