Fishing for my phone in the bottomless pit of bilge

I wanted to clean the engine bilge before putting back the engine, now its oil leaks are cured.

Belts and belts and braces. Well strapped down on trailer with ratchet straps fore and aft as well. The engine is screwed to he wooden engine barers too.

For some reason I don't understand an Oyster 39 has a 4 foot deep hole under the engine to drop things down. The rest of the bilge is shallow but this goes right down in to the keel. The hole is triangular in cross section and has a confusion of pipes over it including grey water in and out. The grey water tank occupies the bilge forward of the bottomless pit. I was leaning in to it to reach down to get out the much when I heard a plop. My Samsung S4 phone had fallen in the hole. It was waterpoof ad I could still hear it beep but it did not float. Moreover the water at the bottom was to dirty to see it. As I couldn't reach it I thought I would continue pumping and washing in the hope of seeing it. My bilge pump did not manange to get up the last bit of water and now I had foam obscuring it instead of oil.

Retrieved... look its still alive

It began to feel like one of those cave rescue sagas where you could still hear the victim wedged in the cave but the rescuers could not reach them.  The clock was ticking as we had to go home and the engine is being craned in tomorrow. I was wondering if I was going to have to abandon the phone even though it was still alive. I imagined if we inverted in the open ocean and the boat came up with gear everywhere fallen out of lockers the rig damaged but my phone appeared shaken from the bilge.

Several helpful suggestions (and some unhelpful ones) arrived via Facebook and email. The phone pinging from the depths. They also appeared on my work phone and from America Simon suggested duck tape, sticky side out, on the end of he bilge pump.

Sarah, frustrated that she wanted to ge home now joined the fishing expedition. She caught an old screwdriver, the strainer end of the pipe for the manual bilge pump, and eventually she eased he phone up at the narrow end until I could grab it.



The case is a Red Pepper waterproof case for Samsung S4.  I bought it for about £20 in a phone shop in Cardiff. It is rated at 2m for 45 mins. It survived several hours in several tens of cm of oily water and was subjected to a high pressure jet of water too. It dropped about 1.3m into shallow water.  There was a very slight ingress of oil on one of the seals. As a case it is of course a little bulky and the screen does not respond as well as without but it is manageable and I leave the case on most of the time. I usually have big pockets and the case makes it easier to get hold of if anything. There is a special waterproof adapter if you want to use the ear phone jack (I don't). It has a simple flip down lid for the charging socket which is not waterproof. Some micro USB so plugs, not the official Samsung ones, are too fat to go in.  The phone does not float in the case in water.

Lessons learnt include putting some kind of grill over this hole, and fitting a landyard to the phone case (it has a hole). Certainly that would make it easier to fish out!

Engine out for major service

Time to fix the oil leaks that plagued us last year. The beast is a Thornycroft 154, a 2.5L marinized BMC diesel engine. Mine was originally supplied in 1981 by ARS in Norfolk when Tui was made. The mechanic at Dekanian Yachts (who finished the hull bought from Oyster) ,  moved there when MacWester went bust. Older gaskets were made of cork, and I have a fairly complete set that came with the boat and we carry as spares. However they have a limited life and modern gasket material is much more long lasting.

The cockpit sole and "dinghy locker" removed its a long way down to the engine!

 

Finally its free

Flying engine

In the trailer and partly strapped down.

I had the engine craned out at Hull Marina, using the jib on their Wise hoist. I needed to remove the service alternator, the water pump and one of the legs  (the engine's mounting legs  not mine) to get it out and then it required some careful tilting and manoeuvring. The team at Hull Marina were very experienced, calm and helpful. For me it was somewhat stressful. Especially when we realised I had not disconnect everything (engine stop cable was one I missed).

 I had borrowed a small trailer (from Shipshape) and had wedged in large bits of wood so the engine mounts could sit on them and then held it down with ratchet straps and covered with a plastic tarp.

 The sump and two other gaskets were leaking and there was a hairline crack in the sump as well, that only leaked when the engine got up to working temperature. Rodney from Shipshape Marine Engineering in Hazel Grove has it all done now, and a coat of battle ship grey heat resistant paint. The lighter colour paint should make it easy to see any further oil leaks in the future.

I am going to call it Gandalf. Next time I will paint it white. We held it on to the wood using big wood screws and coach bolts but still used lots of ratchet straps.  This type of box trailer is not ideal - it has no suspension or brakes and while it is rated to take the weight I had to make sure the load was taken by the chassis not the flimsy box. I even reinforced the base of the load space with some hefty plywood.

Rodney suspected that we had used the wrong grade of oil. We use 20/50 multigrade mineral oil generally which agrees with the engine service manual.  In Tyboron we couldn't get that so used one with a lower SAE. Rodney recommends single grade SAE 30 oil (the older owners manual say SAE 20 or 30 depending on ambient temperature).

I painted the Bowman heat exchanger, oil coolers and associated pipes in blue Hammerite. Here it is ready to go back to Hull. I might have used an excessive number of ratchet straps but I am nervous about heavy things on trailers.

There must be 50 ways to track your sailboat...

Well I am not sure there are 50, but there are a lot of ways to do it now. Of course there are Satellite based services you pay for with a subscription. These use the same Satellite networks that sat phones use (with the same coverage) Yellow Brick and Spot are best known, also inReach from DeLorme, some Sat phones also have a built in ability to send position reports. What I am interested in is ways to do it without a subscription.

AIS

If you have an AIS transmitter on your boat then web sites like MarineTraffic will display your position when you are within line of sight range of one of their receivers on the coast.  If you have a class A AIS transmitter Marine traffic may be able to track you away from the coast by picking your AIS signal fro a Satellite. But class A AIS systems are more expensive and you need to pay for a subscription to Marine Traffic to see satellite reports. Here are some of the AIS monitoring web sites with (hopefully) a link to Tui.

• MarineTraffic this is one of the best for coverage
• Vessel Tracker
• Vessel Finder
• FleetMon
• PortMaps this is a German site but has a nice feature of showing the position on a Navionics Marine Chart
• APRS.FI This Finnish site is not for profit and run by radio amateurs but it does show you the AIS position for any date, however it does not yet have an extensive receiver network. It also tracks Amateur Radio call signs

HF Radio/PACTOR

The Hf (high frequency) radio, is usually called SSB by boaty types, but it does not just use Single Side Band (a type of modulation for voice) but can also send digital signals.  On Tui we use a PACTOR modem connected to the ships ICOM 710 marine radio, or my Ham radio.

• Winlink (email etc over amateur HF radio) may have a position report associated with my ham radio call sign M0WLH. Usually a position report is sent when we connect to send or receive email or download a GRIB weather map. 
• We may be able to send position reports to Yotreps over HF radio  as well. On that site we use the call sign MRGV9.  It will show "No Reports" if there is no recent position report.
• Yachttrack is another web site that gathers position data. It currently says we (M0WLH) are hanging out near Panama with a lot of other happy yachts having a winter party. This is because I was testing the PACTOR modem at home and that must be the default location for OpenCPN/Navigatrix when there is no GPS connected. Oops. A link there for M0WLH goes to positionreports.de where you can see our amazing transatlantic virtual voyage.
• APRS.FI also picks up ham radio call sign reports, but see APRS below 

APRS

APRS (Automatic packet reporting system), is an Amateur radio tracking service.  Mostly radio hams send position reports using 2m (VHF) radio including small (cheapish about £100) portable beacons, or a thing called a TNC (Terminal Node Controller basically a modem) connected to a 2m ham radio (which could be a hand portable or vehicle type).  There are Android apps that work as a TNC when connected to a radio using the sound output, and they can also send position reports over mobile internet.  APRS.FI picks up  most of these reports associated with the amateur call sign. There is an extra character that is meant to indicate the type of station (which comes up as an icon on maps). Eg Y is a yacht.  My PACTOR modem can also work as an APRS position beacon. You can just connect a modem to terminals on the back, type a few commands over the serial line and away it goes. If it is connected to an HF radio it will need to be able to get to an APRS gateway and I suspect that there are not many of those around in Europe but lots in N America. Also as HF goes so far it wouldn't take many stations putting out regular position reports to swamp them. APSRS can also be used with amateur radio satellites using VHF (but right now there are not that many working ham radio satellites).

Edit: I have just found a video of a yacht using APRS over HF to track its voyage in the N Atlantic.

Ultimate3 on a breadboa

WSPR

WSPR ("Whisper") is a ham radio digital protocol used to study the propagation of radio waves. With HF the signal bounces off the ionosphere and different frequency bands will go a different distance at different times of day. When using Airmail to send your email using a PACTOR there is a nice tool that tells you what the probability is of reaching each of the nearby relay stations on each band. WSPR typically uses very low power HF radio beacons which transmit a simple message with the position, call sign and power used using a very robust protocol. The position is given using a 4 character Maidenhead locator. A grid square in Lat and Long. Fortunately an extension of WSPR gives the 6 digit locator, this gives an accuracy of 2.5' of latitude by 5' of longitude.although the message takes longer to transmit. This is accurate to within about 5 or 6 nautical miles. Inspired by Robert Kraowski's success, transmitting his position from a yacht off Fiji and having it picked up in Finland and Greece I bought a kit for the same beacon. The Ultimate3 beacon by QRPlabs. This little kit costs $29US and uses about 200mA.
I tried to assemble mine over Christmas but it was just on the limit of my soldering ability. All the surface mounted parts are pre assembled but I managed to fry a couple of tracks. It is currently working but on a breadboard. The user community, and Hans Summers who designed the kit are incredibly helpful and the instructions are comprehensive. Just make sure you practice with a fine soldering iron first.





The map shows stations that received my signal from home the first time I got it working. The range from about 700 to 2000km away, and this is using the 20m band, 14.097MHz. For a nice tool that gives what to expect on propagation see voacap.

[I will update this when I have it soldered on a PCB and in a box!]

Here is my Ultiamte3S all nicely soldered on a PCB

Thanks to Jim Fairhurst, fellow member of Buxton Radio Amateurs, for an evening teaching me to solder better in which we made the kit up.  It is currently being tested on a 5m fishing pole whip antenna in the garden.  It has been heard up to 2100km away, furthest so far is Haifa in Israel.

The U3S and an old MFJ manual antenna tuner are in a waterproof laptop bag (that I got from a fishing tackle shop). There are three 5m wires laid out as "radials".  On the boat I am planning a smaller manual antenna tuner and a Kevlar reinforced wire to the spreaders.   To set it up I used a Sark antenna analyser.

Tui's 2014 voyage Conwy-Copenhagen-Hull Slideshow

The photos from the Inverse Viking Log on a video slide show.






You can read the full log

“Operation Inverse Viking”:

our summer in Denmark.

Tui goes through the Swellies

This is a slide show of Tui Launching at Dinas boat yard at Y Felinheli in March 2013 and going through "The Swellies", a notorious narrow rocky part of the Menai Straits (between Anglesey and North Wales).

For sailing directions I recommend The Caernarfon Harbour Trust's excellent pilotage guide . The main trick is the timing of leaving with respect to slack water, and memorizing the leading marks
We were nervous as this was Tui's first voyage after I bought her.

Replacing the prop anode

Tui has a Maxprop folding three bladed propeller with an anode on the hub as well as on the shaft to corrode before the propeller does.  The holes tend to corrode first  then the anode can fall off. To discourage that I painted the holes on the new one, hopefully it stays on longer.

This is the prop at Dinas boatyard both anodes corroded.

This is what one looks like with the anode fitted from the PY website (they make max props)

Photos by Katie Lionheart of me diving in Taarbaek to fit a new anode.  It is not exactly Cousteau!

I found it quite hard to work with both hands while staying in the same place, also not dropping the four screws.  I found a youtube video of a diver doing the same job, except he starts with the anode and the screws removed and only carries one screw at a time. 

Here it is underwater. No anode.

Thanks to suppliers

In a trip like our Inverse Viking Expedition to Denmark there were lots of suppliers of chandlery and services who contributed, especially those who made an extra effort to et things done in time to set off. Here are some of them (I haven't mentioned all the harbour and marina staff here but most of them get a thankyou in the log).

The Boatshed sail makers  a Port Donorwic did a great job on the new spray hood and cockpit cover. The nice clear windows and good fit made us especially happy.

The spray hood and cockpit  enclosure at Taarbaek

Tui goes amphibious with Graham driving the wise hoist.

The previous year we were at Dinas Boat Yard  at Y Felinheli on the Manai Strait  and Graham and Paul there are extremely helpful. Graham is highly skilled at driving the Wise Hoist and his calm proficiency was most reassuring when we first launched. When we got to Hull we had move the cradle they had looked after in N Wales and both Paul and Graham were very helpful with a picture of how it goes together and marks so I knew what joined what, and finding an igneous way to get me the Acro prop we forgot.

Steve Owen at PD Riggers checked our rigging, serviced winches and got the mast down and up.


Thanks to Richard at Yacht Systems in North Wales for getting the holding tank fitted in time. It was a difficult task to work out how to fit one in especially from parts available within the time frame.

As well as the many on line retailers bricks-and-mortar chandlers have been especially helpful notably Craig at Yacht Chandlers Conwy, Rondney at Shipshape Marine in Hazel Grove, and Richard and others at Kildale Marine in Hull 

The cradle loaded on a trailer at Y Felinheli on the way to Hull.

The replacement prop anode was from Invicta Anodes who were efficient in shipping it to Denmark. The scuba gear was hired from Scuba Gear in Copenhagen.

Thanks to Bob Smith from YachtCom/SailCom for training on the Long Range Certificate and supplying advice and  hardware to sort out the SSB antenna. We bought our PACTOR from Paul Richards radios.net.au excellent prompt and efficient service.