Kaimusailing

s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran

Vessel Name: Kaimu
Vessel Make/Model: Wharram Custom
Hailing Port: Norwalk, CT
Crew: Andy and the Kaimu Crew
About: Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area.
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
26 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
14 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
09 January 2024 | St Marys, GA
23 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
10 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
25 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
03 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
26 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
17 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
11 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
04 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
03 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
Recent Blog Posts
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

Just Add Water

The rainy weekend started off with overcast and fog but no rain. It looked like I might be able to get something done on the D4 dinghy. I wanted to change the bow seat which is really the bow deck. The sailing option uses the deck to hold the freestanding mast. I didn’t like how the deck looked, [...]

01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Alternative Seats

The rain event was more wind than rain, strong winds with gusts up to 44 mph. We drove into town to see what the harbor was like. There was a small sailboat that had dragged anchor and was sitting close to shore. The tide was out. We left and played with Bleu at Notter’s Pond.

23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Inside Seams

Day two of the dinghy build started out with me finishing wiring the hull bottoms together on the centerline of the bottom panels. This was much easier than the wiring of the chine edges of the bottom panels and the side panels.

15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Day One

A Wharram Pahi 26 had been anchored in the river nearby the boatyard and was hauled out with the travel lift. I went around to look at it and talked to the owner couple. I was surprised that it had been built in Martinique in 1988. The boat is more than 30 years old.

11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Redux

The inflatable (deflatable) dinghy I had bought was deteriorating. It had bottom seams separating. It is a West Marine branded dinghy made out of PVC. HH66 is the adhesive to reattach the seams. A friend had a similar problem and bought the same adhesive. I was waiting to hear from him how it worked [...]

06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

The Clincher

We decided to go to Amelia Island for the day, probably to the beach. Our plan to cycle around on the Raleigh 20’s seemed like a bad idea, Bleu can’t keep up with a bicycle for very long and when he quits he quits. So we would walk, where?, Fort Clinch State Park. She has a forever pass for Florida [...]

Electric Bos'n's Chair: Pt III

09 October 2011 | at the dock
captn andy/rainy, then beautiful
The frustration of working with the leaky tank was almost unbearable. It was a little repair job that turned into a 4 day job. I finally had to remove the tank and test the outlet fitting using a sawhorse up on deck. I couldn't remove the outlet fitting from the plumbing, so I found a spare. First I tested for any leaks in the tank I may have missed. Then I looked carefully at the outlet with the fitting in place. The fitting wasn't seating properly and closer inspection showed the flange on the tank had developed an edge that prevented the fitting from seating. Some remedial work with a dremel tool and clean up with wet/dry sandpaper and it fit perfectly again. The tank was reassembled and reinstalled and tested OK.

The connections to the water heater were leaking slightly, so they were wrapped with cold shrink tape. This space drains into the shower sump, so a small leak here probably won't matter.

The electric bosun's chair was retrieved from the pile of stuff in the galley. One of the battery connections of the chair was broken. The AGM batteries mounted on the chair use ordinary 1/4" spade fittings. I had soldered the female mating fittings on the battery cables of the chair and it was the solder joint that had failed. I redid the connection using new fittings and crimped them. The AGM batteries hadn't been charged for a while and most of them were bad. I took the four that were in the UPS and tested them. Altogether it looked like I had 6 good AGM's, so I made a charging harness for the 6 batteries.

The next day I put the chair together and went up the mast, inspecting it as I went up, and stopped at the spreaders to work on the spreader light. I needed to find out why it had failed and also identify its wiring at the base of the mast. I removed the bulb and put a "fox and hound" on the fixture wiring. Back down on deck the test tone identified the correct wires easily. Strangely the bulb was still good, it must have had some corrosion. Next was a trip up to the steaming light. The bulb was brought down on deck and tested good. Time to scotch brite the contacts on this one too.

Now the batteries were too low to go back up the mast. The "fox and hound" test tone generator was up there for the duration. The batteries charged overnight and the next day we went up and finished the spreader and steaming lights and brought the "fox and hound" back down.

A second set of batteries were installed on the bos'n's chair and the rigging was brought around to the aft side of the mast to go up to the anchor light at the masthead. Up we went past the spreaders, past the steaming light, then the batteries began to die. Also the rigging didn't allow the bos'n's chair to get high enough to access the top of the mast. It was time to go back down. The dockmaster, a retired state trooper, had pulled into the driveway above the dock. I was aware he was not going from his car to the house, but just sitting there watching me. As I descended, the batteries really gave out. The bos'n's chair ground to a halt. The only way down now was to slip out of the chair and rappel down on the safety line. This was easier said than done. But it was mainly a fear of slipping out of both the chair and the safety sling. Out I went with good control on the way down. It was much quicker than the bos'n's chair. Then, once I was safely on deck, the main halyard was lowered to drop the dead bos'n's chair to the deck.

I removed and gathered the dead batteries and brought them up to the car. The dockmaster was waiting for me. In short, he bawled me out. Don't ever do that again. You really need someone around if anything happens. He was right. I felt a little foolish, doing something I would never advise someone else to do.

The next day the rig was changed to use the main topping lift to allow the bos'n's chair's block to brought right up to the top of the mast. John, a dockworker, was around and I told him about my reprimand and could he please keep an eye on me as I went up again. This time I made it up to the top, but I was about a foot shy of being able to grab the anchor light. Some further rerigging was necessary and I descended without too much trouble. The batteries were low again, so the next attempt would have to wait till the next day. I ended up helping John remove a huge timber from the dockmaster's house and then worked on my foredeck, screwing down the forward beam covers. After I dropped both the ratchet wrench and a box wrench over the side, I was able to fish them up with a big magnet on a string.

I finally made it up to the top of the mast with only one set of batteries. I was at eye level with the anchor light fixture. I brought up a pail of spare batteries, scotchbrite pad, 600 grit wet/dry paper, drinking water, multimeter, and a small towel. I had attached a portable battery to the anchor light leads down at the mast base, so I could use the test meter to see if voltage was present at the masthead.

The anchor light fixture was cleaned out with the pad and the towel, the bulb contacts were cleaned with the wet/dry paper, and the voltage was tested with the meter. The voltage was there, so I reassembled the anchor light fixture, which did not glow at all, and came back down on deck. I presumed the polarity was backwards, because the LED bulb won't light if the polarity is backwards, but when I reversed the connections to the battery on deck, the lamp still did not light.

Later at night we checked again that the lamp did not light with either polarity. I measured the voltage present on the return line, that is, with the positive lead of the battery connected to one of the anchor light wires, I measured from the negative lead of the battery to the other anchor light wire. I tried this with it connected with the opposite polarity also. I was getting a reading which meant the battery was feeding the top of the mast and it was coming down to the meter. Then why wasn't the lamp lighting?

We went to the Annapolis boat show the next day and I looked for any vendors of Aqua Signal who could help me, there was no one there. A search online brought me to the Aqua Signal installation instructions, which included all the series 40 anchor lights. They all used a 4 contact connector. Only the installed options needed to be connected, including anchor light, strobe, tri color, and ground. My light had strobe and anchor light, so there would be three wires, a positive for the strobe, a positive for the anchor light, and a ground for both. My three wires were a red wire looped up from the spreader light, a black, and a green that ran straight up to the anchor light. The only configuration that made sense was that the red lead from the spreader light was a ground wire (the other wire to the spreader light was white) and the black and green wires to the masthead anchor light were positives.

The next morning I hooked up the wires and the light worked. However, the spreader light had red and green wires to it. It would make sense that the green was ground and the red was the hot wire. How could the red be a ground wire for the anchor light? The only thing that made any sense was that the strobe, which needed an external circuit, might be using a low active circuit. This would fire the strobe on the ground side while feeding it a steady 12 volts. Then it made sense. The red wire from the spreader light was the hot 12 volt line to the masthead. It fed both the strobe and the anchor light. The green and black wires coming down from the masthead had to be grounded to turn the lights on. The strobe needed an external circuit which must have been low active, and the anchor light would go to a switch to ground. Of course the wire colors were completely wrong, because I probably wired the mast 10 years ago without encountering the strobe circuit requirements. I then made it work and maybe the dog ate the wiring documentation.

So, now I had to hook up the spreader light wires with green to hot and red to ground. The green wire from the masthead was wired to the anchor light feed from the helm station and the black wire from the masthead was wired to its own location on the terminal strip for some future strobe circuit that had to be high active, pulsing the strobe with 12 volts, I think.

I didn't have to go up the mast again right now, so the electric bos'n's chair was stowed away. I used the batteries on a portable pump and got about 10 gallons out of the chartroom bilge. The chartroom bilge could only have water from the chartroom, from the portlights, or some leak in the overhead of the chartroom. 10 gallons is a lot of water from a dripping leak. What I found was that the shower sump was full of water and the float switch that activated its pump was stuck. The wiring passed from the chartroom bilge to the float switch and that's how the water got into the chartroom. My guess is that the shower sump was full from the stern compartment which had the holding tank and the holding tank vent on deck. The vent wasn't hooked up yet, but it was in a bad location. We had had lots of rain and it would have pooled on the aft deck and drained into the aft compartment through the vent hole. Then it would drain out of the compartment into the shower sump. The sump pump float switch wires go through a hole that is lower than the float switch, so the water would run into the chartroom bilge and collect there. We had a lot of rain and that's where some of it ended up.

I have to redesign the holding tank vent to be raised above deck level, also the sump pump wiring holes need to be caulked watertight.

We had to go all the way down to Virginia to Bev Rocco's art presentation. She had done some artwork on the boat and wanted to be in the crew whenever we sailed. The presentation was in Falls Church and was a great success for her. She only sold two pieces, but her presentation and the subsequent discussion with fellow artists was priceless. There was a piece for Kaimu and a restored large painting for the cottage.

The time has come to turn the focus from boat repairs and boatbuilding, to sailing and organizing the boat for passages. I put away the electric bos'n's chair and the workmate tables. It was an organic process. The boat was transforming itself like a butterfly larva, it was the same organism, but it would look different and be ready to fly again.
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