Goodbye Eli
27 June 2014 | Bodkin Inlet/Chesapeake Bay
Capn Andy/summerlike
The problem with bad fuel in the engine was resolved after draining the main fuel tank. The small day tank was poured through the Baja filter into a clear 2 gallon jar. The fuel looked good. The fuel from the main tank was in two 5 gallon jugs. The fuel was also passed through the Baja filter into the clear jar and some cloudiness was noted on the fuel from one of the jugs while the other jug had fuel with a definite separation layer, pinkish orange. The fuel was decanted off the pink layer and reserved. It certainly won't go back into the tank. The fuel line was removed from the main tank and attached to the day tank. The fuel filter has a water/sediment bowl that can be drained through a petcock. When it was drained, the drainage was collected in a glass jar and it was obviously bad fuel. The primer bulb was used to pump more fuel through the filter into the sediment bowl and it was repeatedly drained until the fuel became clear. The engine was then run at high speed to use the largest fuel jets and hopefully burn off whatever bad fuel was in the float bowls. After quite a while the engine was running perfectly, in port. The day tank ran dry and I was satisfied that the engine was back to normal.
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The main tank will be left empty and checked after the next major rainstorm to see if water gets into the tank. It may be necessary to make a sort of dorade box around the fuel fill to prevent water getting into the tank. It may be that the fuel itself was bad or going bad when it was put in the tank.
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The new Delorme Earthmate GPS bug had tested OK on the Linux machine running Navigatrix. Another computer arrived, a Panasonic Toughbook CF-52 with no hard drive, a broken right arrow button, and an improper SONY AC adapter which did fit the power port, but voltage wouldn't charge the battery to 100%. The CF-52 booted up on the Navigatrix DVD and recognized the Earthmate GPS after a while. It would be possible to use this laptop for navigation without installing a hard drive.
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The second new GPS bug was a Deluo Universal GPS. The only driver available was a serial port emulator, I think PL-2303. When the GPS was plugged into the laptop, the cursor began to jump around. In the Linux machine, it was never recognized, but there is probably a way to get it to work there. An online forum post mentioned that the nav application has to be running before plugging in the GPS, so on an XP machine running OpenCPN, the Deluo was plugged in and it was recognized and provided a fix.
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The plan now is to put the Toughbook in the pilothouse and transfer the Lenovo R60 from the pilothouse to the chartroom. Backup machines will be an older Toughbook for the pilothouse and the old Gateway for the chartroom.
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A replacement for the failed main halyard winch was ordered from eBay, a bronze 2 speed winch for only $50 including shipping. It will be more durable than the marelon winch and at a lower cost than replacement with a new marelon winch.
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The next day computers were located in their respective compartments. The Lenovo R60 and Gateway Solo were fired up in the chartroom and locked onto GPS using the Deluo and a Microsoft GPS bug. The Toughbook CF-52 booted up on Navigatrix DVD and locked onto the Delorme Earthmate GPS bug. The old Toughbook CF-50, which runs Windows XP and has had trouble booting up in the past, didn't boot. Another failure was the permanently installed Garmin GPS which is old enough to be defunct. We will need another GPS device to take its place.
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A cheap solar charge controller arrived from China and I hope it is a typical pulse-width-modulated unit. These have a simple routine of charging up to an equalization voltage, then allowing a lower resting voltage to maintain the batteries. I put this onto the engine battery with 30 watts of solar charging to see how it does. The battery is dual purpose and takes a while to charge up to full charge.
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The sad news that Eli Wallach had passed away prompts the photo. He was 98.