July 2010 Archives

Port engine out of commission, Damifino sits helplessly in Pekin, Ill., only 100 miles from her departure point in Seneca. Yes, that's my wife making out with the dog, Jack. Jack would like it if I moved out, so he could have her all to himself.

I thought we made mediocre to poor progress Tuesday, but Wednesday was even worse!

Some 25 miles across Lake Peoria, Damifino's port (left for you lubbers) engine started acting up. Thinking that the points had slipped closed, as they had on another occasion, we pulled in at the Pekin Access Point -- a public boat ramp with some easy-to-negotiate floating docks extending into fairly deep water -- to have lunch, let the engines cool down, then assess the situation.

No problem with the points. The rest of the distributor system looked good, too. Carburetor accelerator pump was shooting fuel, so fuel is getting to the carburetor. Those are the easy, obvious things.

Getting a little deeper in, I checked the stutter switch. A stutter switch is a little device that robs the engine of ignition spark, and thus power, to make it easier to shift into neutral while the engine is running. Obviously, if the switch shorts out, or is maladjusted, it can make it stall. Since the problem is stalling at idle, the stutter switch is a prime candidate for blame.

You test the stutter switch via the simple expedient of disconnecting it so the engine thinks its contacts are always open. If it is the problem, disconnecting the stutter switch will make the problem go away. I tried it, and the problem didn't go away, so now what?

We're left with fuel issues. I fueled up Wednesday morning, so I might have gotten a load of bad gasoline. The way to test that is to change the fuel filter. So, I commandeered the dog's aluminum water dish to catch the inevitable spillage, and changed the fuel filter. Still no difference.

They were working on a speedboat engine at the next dock, so I went over to seek help. One fellow was obviously the boat owner -- he confined his mechanical activities to blipping the throttle, and looking both confused and concerned. The other, who turned out to be Larry, watched carefully while listening to what noises the engine made.

Larry was the mechanic.

I asked Larry if, after he'd sorted out the speedboat, he'd stop by and take a look at my port engine. He promised to do so, and I got out of their way.

The speedboat sounded as if it had a modified V-6 with a nearly full-race cam, and no muffler. That made it impossible to idle when cold, and sound really rough when warmed up. Perhaps the owner wasn't familiar with the intricacies of tuning a high-performance engine, and wanted it to idle like a passenger car engine. No F--ing way!

Anyway, a few minutes later Larry wandered over to where the Damifino was docked. I explained the situation, and he suggested that the carburetor float valves might be sticking. That sounded like a possibility, so we discussed it. To solve the problem, I'd have to rebuild the carburetors.

That I can do, providing I can find a carburetor rebuilding kit, but it's a big job and not to be jumped into until all other possibilites are exhausted. Don't want to spend a bunch of dollars and a couple of hours only to find that wasn't the problem!

Larry offered to give me a ride to the local Marine equipment dealer. There, the mechanics were all away, but would be back the next day. No, they didn't stock the correct points and condenser to replace what's in there, so no luck with them. I bought a fender adjuster that had caught my eye on a classic Owens yacht the other day -- thought I'd try one out, myself -- and took the store's card to call again if I couldn't solve the problem otherwise.

By this time, it was 3:00 and the day was pretty much shot. With both the temperature and humidity hovering around 95, I decided to give up on solving the problem for the day, and look for a place to tie up for the night.

Larry suggested hiking along the access road a few hundred yards to the Pekin Boat Club, where we could rent a slip for the night.

I'll try again in the morning.

Changing gambling laws have made riverboat casinos superfluous. We spent the night in riverboat ghost town.

This is the second in the ongoing series following our effort to move the Damifino to Naples, Florida.

We only made 74 miles yesterday, which is actually decent progress on the upper Illinois River, with its locks spaced only a few miles. Considering that we didn't start out until after noontime, and passed three locks before giving up the fight at about 6:00 pm, we did okay. It normally takes 1-2 hours to pass through a lock, so getting three hours travel time out of six hours isn't half bad. That's averaging an hour per lock and 25 mph in between.

Twenty five miles per hour doesn't sound like much to people used to burning up the road at 70-80 mph, but on a boat it's moderately fast for a cruiser. Damifino gets up on plane at 12-18 kt (that's nautical miles per hour -- about 15% faster than the same number in mph). Below that speed, the hull pushes laboriously through the water. Above that speed, it skips over the water like a thrown stone. Planing is much more efficient. In between, the hull is constantly trying to climb the hill of water it pushes up as it tries to plow through.

There are two roughly equivalent ways to think of the process of getting up on plane. Sailors think of it as the hull trying to climb up on its own bow wave. Another way to think of it is the hull trying to climb out of the hole in the water (A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by fiberglass, into which you throw money.) that Archimedes said it must create to get bouyant force to hold the boat up  against gravity. To a hydrodynamicist, the displacement regime is when bouyant forces support the boat, and planing is when the hydrodynamic lift supports the hull. In between is a transitional regime where the hull rises out of the water, so bouyant force is lower, and hydrodynamic lift does the rest.

The best fuel economy -- miles covered per gallon burned -- comes when the hull moves fast enough to be fully up on plane, but not much faster. It's easy to tell when that happens: when running as a displacement hull, the boat runs flat through the water. As hydrodynamic forces come into play, the nose rises dramatically. When fully on plane, the nose drops back to run nearly horizontally again. At that point, you have to throttle back to avoid running really fast. That's when you get best fuel economy. On Damifino that's between 22 and 25 knots.

In any case, the 74 miles we made yesterday brought us to Hamm's Holiday Harbor Marina in Peoria, Ill. I actually passed the place because all I could see was a bunch of riverboat casinos. Clearly, some were, shall we say, "derelict," being drawn up on dry land. One, however, looked like it could be in operation. I figured that didn't look like the marina we were looking for. I was wrong.

When we sailed in, (boats still "sail," even powerboats without sails) we found a deep pool with floating docks presenting dozens of slips big enough to dock the Damifino. With no better directions, we pulled into the easiest slip to reach, and tied up.

The riverboats are a side business for the marina owner. In the past, shore-based casinos were illegal in Illinois, and a number of midwestern states. There was a loophole, however, that allowed casino gambling on floating platforms -- hence the launching of a slew of riverboat casinos.

That's all changed, now. The states realized how much revenue they were missing, and changed the laws to allow shore-based casino operations. That made the riverboats superfluous. Hamm's marina owner (Mr. Hamm?) has made a tidy business of taking these white elephants off the casino owners' hands, and cutting them up for scrap. Those in and around the marina pool are awaiting the gentle ministrations of low-wage workers bearing cutting torches.

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View of the Damifino docked in Seneca, Ill. prior to departure.

This entry breaks, once again, from the stated theme of this blog, which is to look at repurcussions of technological developments for society. We'll get back to that theme when we get back to that theme. In the meantime, take a trip with me down the Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Tombigbee rivers, thence around the Gulf of Mexico to the southern tip of Florida.

Some 40-plus years ago, my then bride-to-be asked: "Hey, could we live on a boat?"

She'd seen my parents spending weeks at a time aboard their 36-foot cabin cruiser during the summer, and it looked like a fun, romantic (and cheap) lifestyle. We were at the time firmly rooted in the Boston, Mass. area, however, so the full-time live-aboard lifestyle was impractical. Yet, the idea persisted, resurfacing from time to time.

Another persistent theme became the "I've never been to Florida. Could we go there?" question. Having visited my grandparents at their winter home near Orlando (long before Disney Corp. turned the place into Mickey's Corporate Office), my impression of Florida was of a gigantic sand spit with bugs, and rain every afternoon. It was never top of my list of places to go, so that idea didn't get very far, either.

More recently, when the school failed to pick up Bonnie's teaching contract for the forthcoming year, we finally decided to chuck it all, and abandon the Chicago-area winters for year-round live-aboard boating at the southern tip of Florida.

In the decades since getting married, we'd developed into gypsies, anyway; we'd picked up our own cabin cruiser; and learned the advantages of avoiding the annual butt-freezing season. It was time to live out Bonnie's particular fantasies.

The first step was, of course, a reconnaissance trip. Borrowing the temporarily empty house of a friend in Marco Island, Florida, we spent a week sampling the fleshpots (which, unlike Las Vegas, means beaches, not night clubs), and scrutinizing marinas.

Destination in hand, we returned to refit the Damifino (pronounced "Damn if I know!" We didn't name her. The previous owner did.) for indefinite occupancy, and move her through the western half of the Great Loop cruise track down through the river system and the Inland Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, thence around to Florida's southern tip.

Lest this entry be completely without technological interest, let me note that I'm writing this on the upper deck (under that blue awning in the picture) using my laptop computer, which is wirelessly linked to a WiFi router attached to one of the bulkheads below, and running on ship's 12 VDC. Also on the wireless LAN are a printer, and Bonnie's laptop. The router ties into the Internet through a cellphone link.

The text editor I'm using does not run on my laptop. It's an example of thin-client technology in which I type into text boxes in a web page provided by the blogging section of my website, which runs in rented space on my ISP's server. Since the ISP's hardware is a server farm distributed over much of the U.S., it's also an example of cloud computing at its best.

Ain't tecknollogie wunnerfull!

We're now ready -- or as ready as we ever will be. Today, we drop the lines and blow a kiss and a wave to Illinois. In the words of the Paul Simon song: "We're on our way. We don't know where we're goin'!"

We'll know when we get there.

I'm writing this post to thank all the visitors and commenters to this website, and to answer a few of the many questions I get constantly. As you've probably figured out, I almost never answer comments to this site. I've enough to do to vet comments as they come in, which I try to do every day, attempting to separate real comments from spam. I publish what appear to be legitimate comments to blog entries, and delete what looks like spam.

Many commenters ask for link exchanges, which I do not do. The purpose of link exchanges is to pump up external links for websites, but search engines know all about that strategy, notice it immediately, and automatically mark down sites who use it. Thus, instead of boosting a site's ranking, link exchanges can actually downgrade it.

On the other hand, we do like to have other sites use quotations from our site. There's no need to ask permission. The correct way to handle the situation is to separate direct quotes off between quotation marks, and provide a link to the blog entry. The best way to get the correct link information is to go to the page containing the quote, then copy the text that appears in your browser's address window. Then, paste it into the URL field in your blog software's link dialog box. This covers you with regard to copyright issues, proves to your readers that you didn't just pull the quote out of thin air, and gives me credit for the information. If you look back over my posts, you can see how it's done, as most posts include references to online research that went into the entry.

If you really need to contact me directly for some reason, feel free to use the link provided on the blog page to reach my website. There you will find my email address, which you can use to contact me directly.

A few commenters have asked about my providing guest posts, or writing other copy for their publications. The answer is, "yes." It's what I do, and have been doing professionally for 25 years. For more information go to my website, where you'll see the services I provide. Basically, I provide written content for print and online publications, and ghostwrite material to be published under the client's byline.

Those are the main questions I'm asked by commenters to this blog's postings. Thanks for taking an interest.