Final Repairs

We spent a little more time in Solomons, MD then we wanted to. 

The first five days were a celebration of the completion of our Loop. 

Family members who could come joined us. 

We all enjoyed our time together reminiscing about being on the boat and our adventure.  

We did a cocktail cruise.

We went out to dinner a few times.  

The restaurants seemed to have a competition for who could make the best crab cakes.   They did not disappoint.  

The crab cakes were expensive, but we didn’t care.  

I think I had crab cakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Even leftovers. There’s not much that can beat taking a left over crab cake, heating it in a pan and putting a couple of eggs on top.

We spent a few nights at the Solomons Island Yacht Club (SIYC), and enjoyed meeting the members at SIYC. 

SIYC was a lot like our yacht club, South Beach Yacht Club (SBYC) in San Francisco. There were members from all walks of life, who were very friendly.  They all were excited for us for Crossing Our Wake. 

I did a burgee exchange with their commodore between SBYC and the SIYC.  SBYC’s burgee will fly proudly from the ceiling among the hundreds of other burgees from hundreds of other yacht clubs that SIYC has.

We also celebrated our anniversary, which fell on that weekend.

A couple of problems had developed on Selkie during our last few days transiting from Norfolk. 

The main engine raw water pump developed a leak. It was not serious, but it did need to be addressed. 

The more serious problem was the generator starting to overheat. 

I scheduled Selkie to get service at Washburns Boat Yard in Solomons, Maryland. Washburns had done some work on Selkie before we started on the loop. The owner and his wife are wonderful people and run a good operation. 

As with any mechanical problem, you chase on a boat it’s often not immediately obvious what’s causing the problem. 

We went through several iterations of debugging the generator problem.

We would change out a part, test the generator, see that had not completely solved the problem, order another part and wait two days for it to show up.

We went through three iterations to debug that problem.

That meant six work days, which meant a week and a half where we were at Washburns. But that’s owning a boat is about and downtime solving problems is what you need to expect.

We finally diagnosed the problem correctly and replaced the parts, but I also noticed that the raw water flow when the generator was running was not what it should be.

Checking the strainer on the raw water inlet show that it was clear, but there was very little water coming through.

I pulled the hose off the inlet of the through hall itself and found a bunch of vegetation clogging it. About 15 minutes of tweezer work digging in there release the blockage and suddenly I had to clear flow of water.

I popped the hose back on, opened the valve on the thru-hull and start the generator. It ran like well, and the temperature was stable where it needed to be.

It always feels good when you fix something correctly and you have confidence in what happened. Washburns also rebuilt the main engine raw water pump with some new seals which fixed that problem.

We were pretty happy with the results, although waiting to get everything done was not as quick as we wanted.

But we were selling Selkie, which meant that we needed Selkie to be in good shape to pass a hull survey.

She was ready to be sold.

Selling a boat is like selling a house, where you have to keep it clean and spotless all the time, instead of just living.

Not that our house isn’t spotless and clean all the time. It’s just not a focus, as we like to do a lot of living.

But as anyone knows who has sold a house, it is a pain in the you-know-what to keep things on the up and up.

We had had several couples come look at Selkie.

But while we were in Washburns, we received a bit of good news.

We had a couple come look at Selkie while the Solomons Island Yacht Club.

This latest couple liked Selkie so much that they gave us an offer, which we gladly accepted!

They were a couple Libbie and I immediately liked, which made us feel good about passing her off to people who would care for her as well as we did.

They came back the next weekend, and we started going over Selkie’s systems and how to care for her with them. It was great to get to know Selkie’s (at that time) potential new owners better

It wasn’t until the following Thursday where we were able to wrap up things and say goodbye to Washburns and Solomons.

We were able to celebrate at the Tiki Bar in Solomons before we left. $4 mai tais seemed appropriate.

We headed north towards our final destination. Our intermediate stops would be the Chesapeake Yacht Club, Annapolis, and then Rock Creek where our last marina would be

That trip will be the topic of another post.