Some Boatyard Success

This is 'Dougie', the boatyard dog here at Pickle Point Boatyard in Carnarvon, Western Australia where we've been busy working on Gjoa for the last couple of weeks. Dougie is a real sweetheart, still a puppy at just eleven months, but, he's huge and thankfully, although he very much looks the business of a guard dog, he's very placid and friendly. We've been enjoying his company very much.

Another boatyard diversion is getting to watch the neighbours, the ones in the water, come and go.

When we haven't been enjoying the diversions, we've been working really hard on Gjoa. We're very pleased with all we've accomplished. It was worth this unplanned trip to actually start getting jobs in motion rather than just thinking about having to do them. First up was replacing the cutless bearing. This entailed removing the prop and shaft. It all came out a lot easier than we expected.

Then, out came the cutless bearing. Although it was necessary to cut it into pieces to get it out, you can still see its rather shredded internal appearance!

The new cutless bearing, which we'd ordered from the U.S. and brought with us, needed to have 2mm shaved off for it to fit into the stern tube. The shaft itself also had some minor scoring. We were able to have these machined locally and it all went back together smoothly. At the same time, we replaced the bearings and anode on our Spurs line cutter. Then, we started thinking about the prop. We had some trouble identifying it, we think it's a German Variprop DF107, although the measurements didn't seem to match up with the current model. It's a feathering prop with internal gearing. They don't usually require much maintenance, but, this one is now seventeen years old and maybe needs an experienced eye to check it over. So, while we have the opportunity, we're going to hand carry it back with us to the UK and either have it serviced there, or, send it on to Germany to the original factory and have it looked at there.

Next up, hydraulics. We knew nothing about hydraulics before acquiring this boat. It controls our steering which is obviously a mission critical piece of kit. We have two hydraulic pumps, a manual one behind the steering wheel and an electric autopilot drive pump. On the way down from Malaysia we started getting 'drivestop errors' on our autopilot. It just got worse and worse until the autopilot was practically unusable, not a good thing. The manual steering seemed to be having a few problems as well. After some study and analysis, we deduced that it probably wasn't the electronic piece of the autopilot that was failing, but, rather the physical movement of the hydraulic ram and rudder combination that was causing the problem.  After inspecting the ram, we could see leakage of fluid, which means the internal seals are probably gone. So, it had to come out for a rebuild.

Removing the hydraulic autopilot drive pump was a daunting task, but, there was no point rebuilding the ram without the pump being done also. It was buried under the diesel day tank and access was blocked by various water pumps and systems in front of it. Believe me, there is a pump somewhere in this photo. It took a full day to disassemble everything, but, it eventually came out.

As a stretch goal, we'd brought a new Racor fuel filter system with us and we actually got that installed as well. We installed a single 30 micron filter unit for fuel coming out of the main tank into the day tank and a dual, hot switchable, 10 micron filter unit for fuel coming out of the day tank going to either the on-engine or generator fuel filters. Racor has a good reputation and their filters are much easier and less expensive to source worldwide than the previous Separ units. We don't know whether it was just 'sales talk', but, the Racor rep told us that Separ units, when faced with a clogging filter, just switch themselves to an automatic bypass mode. You think you're filtering your fuel, but you're actually not. This process must be what caused the multiple fuel filtration problems we had on the way down as there is no other explanation.

We are leaving Carnarvon tomorrow for the two day drive to Perth where we will have the ram and autopilot pump rebuilt. Next trip back we will pick up and reinstall the rebuilt pieces and hope it all works! In the meantime, we're planning a mini road trip around Perth for some well-deserved R & R after our exertions of this past couple of weeks.