Boat Chores

Lately we've done a few boat chores.  One entertaining one was cleaning the bilges.  I was prompted to do this by coming down to the boat on a Friday evening and being annoyed at the odor in my cabin.  It is not unusual for an older diesel powered boat to have a bit of an interesting aroma to it, but on this evening it just seemed stronger and more funky than usual. 

I grabbed a flashlight and opened up the bilge compartment in the aft cabin.  The opening is maybe 12x12 and the area of the bilge it gives access to is fairly limited as the bilge basically ends shortly aft of it and there is a fuel tank under the floor forward of it that limits access to clean beneath it.  There are also a couple of pieces of pipe sticking up with no discernible purpose.  The surveyor who did our pre-purchase survey thought the pipes were rather odd.  So as to the cleaning bit, there was a lot of what seemed like sediment in there.  This is where I was really glad we got a shop vac, as that sure came in handy as I attacked the bilge with most every cleaning product we had on the boat, then added water (the handheld shower head conveniently is long enough to spray into the bilge) and vacuumed.  I wouldn't say it was spotless or odor free when I was done, but I sure got a lot of gunk out of there.  Best not to think about what it was or where it came from...

The next day I set about cleaning the rest of the bilge, starting forward at the access hatch in the galley.  this is a much larger access hatch, maybe 24" x 24".  I ran the water hose in through the port in the head, adjacent to the galley, and got out the long handled brush to reach as far forward as possible in the bilge.  It goes a long way forward from this access point, to where it tapers up to nothing at the bow.  I spent quite sometime psyching myself up to duck down under the floor and crawl around in there.  I finally convinced myself it would be better than being in a crawl space, which I have done before, as it is HIGHLY unlikely there is anything other than spiders possibly living in there.  No rodents or snakes, for instance.  Though one of our friends once found a dead rat on his boat.... but I digress.  So I finally decided to go for it but I couldn't actually contort my body enough to get fully in there.  Maybe if I had tried harder... No, definitely no way.  So I scrubbed as best as I could as far forward as I could.  The space only went aft a few feet before running into the bulkhead for the engine room, which was my next area of bilge to attack.   This forward area came fairly clean and did not have any weird mystery sediment.

So onto the engine room.  I brought the hose through the side door and removed all the floor boards to the engine compartment.  The floor of the engine room then comes up in two sections.  I had very limited access to the aft section of the bilge under the engine room as the battery boxes come down in that area and I did not want to risk getting water on the batteries.  As it was I manged to spray water everywhere a few (okay SEVERAL) times.  What I could reach did come fairly clean.

This whole project took several hours and the net result was a fairly clean looking bilge but not a significant improvement in the funkiness factor.  Ah the joys of boat ownership.  We just brought the dehumidifier back to the boat so maybe that will help with the general funkiness.

Another recent chore was changing the oil.  It had been over a hundred hours on the motors (we put on 111 hours in the year we'd had the boat).  We were well prepared for this chore as we had purchased of a couple of cases of Delo 400 15W-40 in advance.  We rose bright and early Saturday to begin... then realized we did not have oil filters.  Which began a lengthy errand run that sent us to three different stores.  The giant filters our motors take are not a standard item at the corner auto parts store, unfortunately, so that took visits to two stores.  We also needed some kind of container to put some of the oil from each motor and the generator in (each in its own container) so we could have the oil analyzed and compared to the oil analysis done prior to purchase.  We are lucky to have a good friend that can get this analysis done for us locally.  The point of this is to watch for trends which could be signs of problems with the motor, so hopefully you can nip them in the bud before they might lead to greater problems.  So anyway we ended up buying some plastic storage containers at the grocery store for that.

So we FINALLY got back to the marina and borrowed an oil extractor from a friend and set to work sucking out about 22 quarts of oil, between the two Perkins and the generator.  As the extractor only holds five quarts and we did not want to mix oil from different motors, due to the sampling, this process involved MANY trips back and forth to dump the oil in to the used oil container the marina maintains.  We tried to speed things up a bit by using a second oil extractor but we could not get it to build up any suction to actually EXTRACT any oil so that was a lost cause.  Finally, many, many hours after our early arising to attack this project we were done. 

...Except we didn't have QUITE enough oil to refill everything we emptied so we had to go back to the store (later that week) and get more before we were really done.  And then we ended up putting a touch too MUCH oil in the port motor and then had to take some back out.  Sigh.  Nothing is ever simple when it comes to this yachting stuff!

We really need to go back and get some spare oil filter to keep on the boat but we haven't made time yet--we cleaned out the store's stock to get enough for the oil change.  Soon.