S/V Passage - Refitting a Classic (& Building Our Skills) Before Cutting the Docklines

The blog may have been quiet lately but we sure haven’t been slacking! After receiving the spring bridge schedule (we can only put the boat in and take it up river on certain days approved by the city), we had a mad rush in April to cut our to do list down to “musts” since the NATO summit and repair work on the Chicago lock forced the bridges to close for two weekends in a row! Argh!

So all we got done before launch was spring cleaning and replacing our broken alternator with a fancy high-output alternator with serpentine pulley system by Electromaax…yes, this is the same system we bought at the 2011 Annapolis Sailboat Show after discussing it’s merits with Nigel Calder himself. If it wasn’t for our friends Mike and Genevieve, we never would have gotten it done before our launch date…thanks guys!

We made it upriver on May 13th in “record time”…only 4 hours versus the 6 last fall…and had the help of our wonderful friends Dave, Liz, Brian, and Lauren! Thanks to their fine assistance getting Passage back to Monroe Harbor we have already been able to head out for several sailing adventures with the unseasonably warm spring weather. We even went out during the NATO summit, complete with water/lake patrols by helicopters and US Coast Guard patrol boats! That was interesting, to say the least!

The challenging part of all this is we have a new boat issue to address: our heat exchanger is leaking coolant through the connection to the new alternator’s (also new) water pump. We’re 99% sure it’s not a crack in the engine housing…but could it be a slight tear in one of the two gaskets? None of the hex-nuts get any tighter so we’ve got some research and grunt work to do before we find the true issue…