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Wednesday, 26 April 2017

That fish box is strong enough most of these guys just use them to keep the beer cold anyway

Nothing better than a good fish story, especially when the fish is so big, you can't spread your hands wide enough to show people how big it really is. The fish is a Warsaw grouper (hence forth referred to as Gigantor), caught in about 650' of water about 140 miles off the coast of Sarasota, and the best guess is that it exceeds 200 lbs. It took three people just to get it into the boat, and as you can see, it dominates a 6' fish box. I will add the actual weight in the comments box, when I get it later today.

The boat is a popular, and higher end center console fish boat, and in general, is a well constructed vessel. The owner loves to fish, I mean really loves to fish, and he does a lot of tournaments. The boat is crammed full with fishing gear, coolers, lot of extra gas containers, and bean bag chairs for over night expeditions.

So enough of Gigantor, see that black crack in the picture below, at the edge of the fish box? That is not where the fish box should be. The back of the box has fallen down about three inches, and now water, and or ice can slosh out of the back end of the box into an area, I suspect was not supposed to have water at all.

It was hard to tell exactly what had happened, because the box had Gigantor the grouper in it, and numerous spectators were hovering around, but the aft center of the box didn't appear to have anything fastening it.

The box seems at first blush, to have been just tabbed with fiberglass in the corners, and under the weight of the fish, and ice, the tabs just failed. The seas were calm, so I ruled out the fact that pounding in 4' seas, with Gigantor in the box could have exacerbated the problem. The attachment was just not adequate, and you can see the torn fiberglass in the corner below. Bad design? Bad manufacturing? I don't know, but this builder can do better than this. The repair will be interesting, because all of the fish box installation was done prior to installation of the deck. I'm sure that this builder will take care of the problem, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. If you want real fishermen to buy the boat, the fish box has to be able to support real fish. Gigantor has had the last laugh as payback for his untimely demise, and all the beer was kept in real coolers.

Just as a side note, I will amend this blog tomorrow with a couple additional photos of the grouper on the scales. The final measured weight is 206 lbs. It is worthy of the name "Gigantor", and boy did it produce some fillets.

Jason Boyll, from the fishing team" Get'n After It!" emailed me a picture of Gigantor hanging on the scales in Cortez Fl. It is impressive, and these guys are are fishing monsters.

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Its Just What Nature Does

It was, again, time to visit local waters and to see what was and what had changed. I carried down the hill from the house, 250 yards and a drop of 75 feet to set out into the sea, and I headed north up the coast with a quartering headwind that caused more chill than effort.

Three double kayaks sat low in the water among the distant rocks that I must pass by. The drivers sat erect and near motionless. I knew they would become cormorants perched on the lowest of the rocks, but for the moment they looked every bit like Aleut sea otter hunters from a century and a half ago.

I rode the flood tide under the low bridge and into the Oyster River. My first visit here was shortly after Hurricane Sandy and I could not for the life of me figure out why it deserved the name, "Oyster". The bottom was nothing but clean sand and it would remain that way for more than a year. The hurricane waters rearranged many things in the marsh. Today, for the first couple hundred yards the bottom is nothing but oysters. A natural repair for a natural disaster.

The bird life lacks the usual diversity that I normally see here. A large number of crows are making noise in the trees, a handful of Canada geese show just their heads from the marsh well back from the river. With every second or so bend, I flush a dozen or two mallards...lots of mallards.

Three brand new osprey boxes have been erected at even spacing along the run of the river.

I decide to paddle up to the bridge just out of pure curiosity. The river past the bridge is choked with phragmites...not a river but just water flowing through porous marsh. But, today I find something new. The river has cut a narrow channel, narrow but wide enough for the canoe. And, I continue.

A few hundred yards and the channel is still open, although it is a wading passage at this point. I can't be sure, but I imagine that this upper section of marsh had been rearranged by the hurricane. Another natural fix for a natural disaster...although nature really doesn't have disasters...it's just what nature does.

Saturday, 25 March 2017

Morons at the gate Just what were they thinking

Just when you think you have seen it all, you find something new. This started when the owner wanted to install a new stereo in this center console fish boat. Sure, piece of cake, and it will take about an hour and a half. The owner also asked if I would look at the power feed on the boat to the console. He felt that there was some issue there, because things would turn off on occasion.

The holes get punched, the speakers and stereo go into them, and I climb into the console to hook up the wiring. Hmmm, no power block, and whats this on the breaker? What the dealer had done was to jumper onto the first breaker the power for the Standard Horizon VHF, Garmin GPS, Hummingbird depth finder, and a couple of other items. All of this was somewhat corroded.

Then I looked at the power feed to the console. In the upper picture, you can see the red #10 wire curled up that feeds the panel. That white #16 wire wrapped around the red wire was attached to it. The panel builder was expecting a #10 feed wire, but the boat builder used an under sized cheesy grade white wire to connect to the power to the panel. All of those other white wires you see are also 12VDC positive feed wires. I guess this builder had run out of red wire, and used whatever they had laying around.

In the second picture you can see the white wire coming out of the battery switch. Yep, the same cheesy white wire that feeds the panel. The panel was providing power for the electronics, bilge and baitwell pumps, fish box pump, nav lights, and everything else. I think the total possible load would be approaching 20 amps, and all of it being carried on the cheesy #16 wire. At 3% voltage drop the wire should have been at least a #10. Funny, that's what the panel builder thought also, because that was the wire size they used.

If I hadn't made the point clearly enough, this was unsafe wiring, and could have resulted in a power failure, or in the worst case possibly a fire.

So in the end, I pulled in a new #10 feed, installed a fuse block for all of the accessories, cleaned up some corrosion issues, and life is now safer, and better for the owner. This was a very bad piece of work by this builder, and it appears they have no quality control, or just don't care, or both..

Wednesday, 8 March 2017

A Formula 330SS update story you can always make it work you just have to be inventive!

The moral of this little story is that almost anything is possible, if you do some creative thinking. Hard work, and a little luck is always helpful also. The subject is an 2005 Formula 330SS. It is a pretty boat, with a large cockpit, and nice hull lines. The new owner is a nice guy, and I think he purchased it for a good price. I was originally contacted to update the electronics. The owner had very carefully measured the space available for a new chart plotter, and had purchased a new Garmin 4210 unit. It will fit, and I mean just fit into the console. He also bought a new transducer, GSD22 sounder module, GXM51 weather receiver, GFS10 fuel flow sender, and a Garmin 100 VHF (boy I wish it was a N2K unit). He also wanted a autopilot, and I said no, possible, but no. My reason for saying no was two fold. The first was the boat was cable steered, (I/O) and the second was there was no room in the engine room for an over sized linear drive, or anything else, so sorry, no.

A few days later, I get a call from the owner, and he tells me the engines are being removed. Is an auto pilot possible now? The answer is now yes, and we will now buy a Garmin autopilot system.

With the engines removed, and the hatch off, the compartment now feels like the boat equivalent of being on the open western plains, and I can now almost feel the winds sweeping down, and see the big skies. Room galore, everything is accessible, and in installer terms, sheer heaven.

The first task is to install a new transducer. With the engines in place, the options would have been very limited, and the task difficult. At the same time, the AC water pump was mounted under the generator, and looked pretty beat up, so the AC guy removed it and put a new one in under the hinged panel, making it accessible, and installed a valve to boot to break any airlocks (the boat lives on a storage rack).

The boat had a cable steer Teleflex system, which had to be removed, so it was detached from the power assist steering pump, and back pulled up to the helm. It took some real gyrations, and effort by two of us to get this 25' cable out, because at install time, it was tie wrapped with other wiring inside the combings. Who would have every thought it might break, or need to be replaced in the future?

Teleflex makes a special hydraulic cylinder to replace the cable steer system, and here is the catch. You can see the the cylinder, now attached to the power assist pump in the picture, and the outboard end is now about five inches from the hull. To install it, the whole power assist module, had to be removed in order to slide the shaft into place. Easy now, impossible with the engines in place. And as a personal note, many thanks to Marc Adams from Teleflex for his patience, and most excellent advice. It was most appreciated.

Now on to the hydraulic helm pump. The steering system attached to a round fiberglass protrusion formed into the console. If the new helm pump was just mounted there, the helm would have stuck straight out. This would have been both ugly, and awkward for the driver. As an additional point, there was not enough room behind the console to use a tilt helm unit.

Teleflex makes a 20 degree mounting plate, but it has a square mounting flange, and would not fit in this location. So, when you look at the picture above, the 20 degree angle piece, that the new helm is attached to, is the plastic housing from the old cable steer system. I took "all thread", and cut four new long custom mounting studs, and epoxied the old steering base to the new helm pump. Just so there is not any wincing from my colleagues, the plastic base actually fit, with some minor carving, pretty tightly around the new studs, and the epoxy was more to hold it in position, than to attach it to the new helm. It worked a treat. The fall back plan, would have been taking the other 20 degree aluminum mounting flange to a machine shop, milling off the flange, drilling holes in the top, to allow long bolts to attach it, and did I mention the whole part would then have to be stripped, primed, and repainted? I think it all worked out great, and looks good.

The hydraulic plumbing was a real pain. There was little space behind the steering system to install the hydraulic lines, and despite my best efforts at planning ahead, it took three trips to a large hardware store, to end up with a configuration that would work.

There are now two problems left to go. Yann, my new aide, is now removing a vinyl padded trim strip from the boat. The new Garmin VHF radio's foot print is much larger than the old Standard Horizon VHF, and so it goes bye bye.

The solution was to take 1/2" white acrylic, and have it milled to the same shape as the original vinyl panel, with a curvaceous lower extension to allow the VHF to be flush mounted. Good looking, and it closely matches the original panel.

The time for final battle has come, and the one I was dreading the most, installation of the Garmin 4210. The original panel where the Garmin was being mounted had a 1/4" aluminum wood grainy looking panel, that matched the the other panels in the console. There were two problems with the panel. The first was at the bottom of the panel, there was some oxidation occurring, and it wouldn't be long before the wood grain looking stuff started to fall off. The second problem was when the hole was cut out in the panel for the Garmin, there would be very little panel left. I was less than confident I could cut out the panel myself, and option number two was to take it to a machine shop, and have a milling machine do the cut out, and time was of the essence.

The fall back was to have a gray acrylic panel made to take the place of it. When the panel cut out was made, there was little left, but it looked good.

So attach the plugs to the unit, and set it in place. I already knew what was going to happen. The plugs stuck out too far from the back, and it missed seating all the way down by about 3/8'. Although I knew the answer, I called Garmin, and inquired it the were any shorter plug options, and I got a terse no.

So when depth fails, a sharp utility, and a band saw prevails. Step one. The worst depth offender was the marine network plug for the GSD22. I cut off the old plug, and took a new field replaceable plug, and lopped off about a 1/2" on the band saw, and threw away the spirally thingy that came with it. I re-terminated the cable, and had a 1/4" to spare. Now the power cord. A utility knife carved away the upper part of the wire sheathing until we got to the place where the wires were molded into a white plastic material. This allowed the two wires to bend over without straining, and the second problem was solved. Just a little carving on the N2K connector, and the unit fit, without cramping the wiring. The last step was to tab the corners of the unit with silicone to hold it in place. It was not possible to bolt it in.

It looks good doesn't it? Everything is factory appearing. The auto pilot head, at the owners request went into the location where a pitot tube driven speedometer was located, and there really wasn't any other place for it to go.

There is a wart. The Garmin 100 VHF only has the old NMEA 0183 interface, and there was no way, the huge NMEA cable was going to be carved back to fit. There is, theoretically, some space behind the console, and a cut out might be possible to allow this cable to work, but the boat is going on a trip, and I was happy to have gotten done, in time at all.

All in all I am pleased with the work, but it was the most fiddly job I have done in a long time. A lot of stuff, crammed into spaces that they were not designed for, and it seemed everything needed some modification.

And to all of you chart plotter makers, It is not a contest to see who can make their plugs stick out the furthest. Shorter is always better, or at least sell me 90 degree adapters.

A final look at the engine room with the engines installed. Everything looks brand new. It is spotlessly clean. I wonder if I could train spider monkeys to work in these tight quarters? No, they would probably just complain it was to hot, and cramped to do the work, and go back to the organ grinder.