On the trip down here from Vero Beach we had been bilging too frequently. So after snagging the mooring, I had Christy leave the engine running while I went in and checked out the engine room. There was water coming out of the fresh water cooling overflow tank. This means that the fresh water side of the cooling system is getting some extra water somewhere. I guess the likely culprit would be…….the ocean. The heat exchanger in a sailboat takes the place of a radiator in your car.
The fresh water side is kept separate but cooled by the raw water side of the system. This exchange of heat takes place, that’s right, in the heat exchanger. Evidently ours “shit the bed” so to speak. It’s rotted inside allowing salt water to invade the fresh water side of the system and since the raw water is pressurized its coming out the top of the overflow tank. Crap.
As luck would have it there is a Westerbeke dealer here in Stuart. A quick call to him and we had the only heat exchanger for 200 miles on its way to us, for a tidy sum. The dealer was too far away for me to walk so the parts guy volunteered to drive it down to us as it was on his way home.
He was going to call me when he left work and arrange a meeting spot. As luck would have it he called while we were just about to meet people at a local watering hole for happy hour. When he called I told him we were at Duffy’s and he said “Great that’s right around the corner from my house”. 10 minutes later he pulled up in front of the bar and dropped off our new heat exchanger, oh, and its quite lovely.
Now for some crew news. Tucker’s been a little under the weather lately. The last day we spent in Vero Beach was a nightmare. We came back to the boat after a day in town only to discover that Tucker had a nasty case of the Hershey Squirts. So now he’s not allowed in the boat anymore. They’ll be no pictures….
The weather has been in the seventies during the night so he and Molly have been sleeping in the cockpit. During their walks, Molly is all business as usual while Tucker can’t seem to go. Some of the walks have turned into extended forced marches and still nothing. His problem seemed to start when we opened a new bag of food. I thought maybe it had gone bad so we tried another type and bag of food. No difference.
He gets up a few times a night, goes out on the deck and takes care of business, gets back into the cockpit and goes back to bed. Christy or I wash down the deck in the morning and all is fine.
Now it’s been a few days and he seems like himself except for the whole rocket crap thing. There’s a vet that’s fairly close here in Stuart. We can save a mile of walking by taking the dinghy across the river. Christy calls a marina that looks as it would be the closest place to start walking to the vet. She explains about Tucker and his “issue”. The woman that answers is a dog lover, Yes. No problem, tie the dink here as long as you need to.
It’s still a fairly long walk to the vet. The vet examines Tucker and he seems to be fine. No worms, nothing. She says his stomach could have just been upset and he’s having a problem getting back into his rhythm. She sells us some magic food that will settle him down, bind him up, whatever. We give her our families cow for the magic beans, err, food and leave.
Believe it or not but it seems to have worked. No shit. Literally. So all is well in the village again.
Molly and Tucker seem to enjoy sleeping in the cockpit so as long as the weather permits that’s where they’ll stay for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment