Single point of failure

We are underway eastbound across Lake Okeechobee, bound for the dolphins in Port Mayaca. We're pressing through on a long day, with the navigation depth in the lake just 6.39' and going down about a half inch each day. The sounder has already registered 6.3', or just four inches between our skeg and the bedrock lake bottom.

Tuesday we weighed anchor at Bird Key and headed back to the ICW. It would have been a nice day to run outside, but we can not get out at Big Sarasota Pass. I was off on my timing by a few minutes and we had to run hard for a bit to make the first timed bridge before settling into a more relaxed pace.  We passed Venice without stopping, continuing on the inside with over a foot of tidal help to get us past the notorious shallow sections.

An ignoble end to this little Nordic Tug, sunk in the Englewood anchorage.

We contemplated stopping at a familiar anchorage in Englewood, where we can get ashore and have a choice of dining options which have reopened since the storms. But it was early in the afternoon, and we could see the anchorage peppered with sunken vessels; an excavator nearby on a spud barge told the tale. We opted to press on.

Instead we stopped at another familiar anchorage, which we have not used in many years, in a "lollipop" off the channel in Cape Haze (map). We had it to ourselves. Sadly, the casual Italian place with draft beer right next door to the Publix ashore folded a year or so ago, replaced by a sushi place of unknown quality. We instead tendered ashore at the bridge abutment on the canal and walked 3/4 mile in the other direction to a more upscale Italian place, Apulia Osteria Italiana. It was quite good but we thought it expensive for the neighborhood. That precluded a Publix stop, which was the other direction.

Flux tied up at the bridge abutment in Cape Haze. That concrete looks horizontal here but it's a 40° slope.

Wednesday morning I ruminated about going back ashore for a quick Publix run, as we were shortly going to need milk and lunch fixings, and I would also stop at the gas station next door to get fuel for the tender. But we decided we would be stopping in LaBelle on the way to the lake in just a couple of days, and we would just get it all there. We decked the tender and weighed anchor to make the 9:30 opening at the Boca Grande causeway.

We were hoping, on this pass, to finally make it up Charlotte Harbor to Punta Gorda, spend a couple of nights, and see some friends. But the closest we can get to Punta Gorda is to anchor 3/4 mile offshore in the middle of the bay, and the forecast was not great for a comfortable stay or for a dry tender ride. When we reached the turn for the bay, winds were already ten knots above that forecast, and we waved it off yet again.

We looked ahead for another stop, and settled on Glover Bight in Cape Coral, where the restaurant courtesy docks have reopened. I had already told friends Gayle and Bill we might be headed for Punta Gorda, where they live when not sailing their catamaran, and I had to tell them we were waving off due to weather. At that point, they suggested they could drive over and meet us instead.

Sunset from our anchorage in Cape Haze.

Cape Coral is a longer drive for them than Fort Myers, and after looking at the chart, we decided we could press on to Fort Myers instead. We dropped the hook in our usual spot (map), and tendered over to the North Fort Myers side, landing at the courtesy docks for the Three Fishermen Seafood Restaurant, adjacent to the Best Western. Bill and Gayle met us there and we had a very nice time catching up with them. The food was also quite good, and we made a note of the place for the next time it's too rough to get ashore on the Fort Myers side.

On our way to Fort Myers I made plans to meet up with friends Brent and Sarah just a few miles upriver on our way out of town. They've offered us the use of their dock behind their house, but I did not want to be navigating a tight, shallow, unfamiliar canal for just a quick visit while we're rushing to make the lake. Instead I suggested we meet up at the nearby Boathouse Tiki Bar and Grill, where we could tender in after dropping the hook across the river.

Sarah was unavailable all afternoon and evening, and so we agreed on a lunch visit, which was perfect timing for us to just drop a lunch hook and then continue upriver to LaBelle, where I needed to run ashore for provisions and fuel. And so it was that we weighed anchor at 9:30, with just enough tide to leave the anchorage, for the eight mile run to the Boathouse at the Wilson Pigott Bridge.

Our friend Ben, editor of Panbo, was out on the water testing equipment when he spotted us passing Glover Bight. Photo: Ben Stein

Louise had reported on our way to Fort Myers that the stabilizer temperature had been creeping up above normal. I inspected the system and found no issues at the time. But just a couple of miles out of Fort Myers, on her first engine room check at the 20-minute mark, she came up to report the stabilizer reservoir temperature was through the roof and she could smell something burnt. A short time later, the stabilizer control went into overheat alarm and centered the fins. A quick check revealed that no cooling water was coming out of the stabilizer cooling overboard discharge.

Further checks revealed the transmission temperature was also climbing well above normal, and I could see the engine temperature rising on my gauge. We were in a narrow part of the river with no good place to stop. A check of the engine exhaust showed that it was getting water, but at a significantly below-normal flow.

We quickly assessed our options: turn around and run what was now over three miles back to Fort Myers, or limp along a little less than five miles further to our planned stop just the other side of the Pigott Bridge. While the U-turn was shorter, the choice was clear: ahead of us were friends with a dock and a car, as well as the Hinkley boatyard, which could not haul us but at least had mechanics. Whereas behind us in Fort Myers was not even a working marina nor a good place to land the tender in all conditions.

Near Venice we were passed by this ice cream boat, the on-water version of the Good Humor truck.

The stabilizers make heat even when they are just centered, so my next order of business was to go down and pin them so we could shut them down. That's a fiddly process involving loosening set screws and finessing the feedback potentiometers to line the pin holes up, which I did while Louise took the helm. We cut power to the system as soon as the pins were in. Louise increased her ER checks to once every fifteen minutes, and we made the rest of the trip at 1300 RPM, or half of redline.

The climbing temperatures, low engine water flow, and missing stabilizer flow all pointed to a water flow problem, which meant either a failing impeller, or a clogged sea strainer. If the impeller was starting to fail, then stopping and restarting the engine for any reason would make it worse, as would large throttle inputs such as I need for docking, or station-keeping at bridges.

The safe anchorage was on the other side of the Wilson Pigott Bridge, and about ten minutes out I radioed the bridge tender and told her I had an emergency, with limited ability to station-keep, and that I would need the bridge open on arrival (bridge tenders in Florida have a bad habit of making you come right up to the bridge before lowering the traffic gates to start the opening). To her credit she started early and had the bridge open for us when we arrived. We pulled through, made a left, and dropped the hook just outside the cable area (map).

Sarah, Brent, Mary Grace, and us, at Boathouse Tiki Bar.

I opened the ER outside hatch and left the fan running, and we splashed the tender and headed ashore. It was great meeting up with Sarah, Brent, and their daughter Mary Grace over lunch. The food was also decent and they had much-needed cold draft beer. With outside temps near 90°, the swimming pool looked mighty inviting, too, but I had lots of work ahead of me and we tendered straight home after saying our goodbyes. They, of course, once again offered their dock or anything else we might need to work through the issues.

The mud in the river here is very soft, and we had anchored on fairly short scope due to surrounding pot floats and the shallow edge of the river. We returned to find Vector moving ever so slowly through the mud, and decided we needed to pay out more scope. We dragged one of the pots a little further away from Vector with the dinghy, and then I used the dinghy to push Vector forward against the current while Louise retrieved the snubber to pay out more chain.

When we arrived I had hoped to wait for things to cool down a bit before diving into repairs, but with the tenuous holding situation I decided to start straight away. We started the generator to get the air conditioning running to cool down the house in the 90° heat, and I set up a box fan to blow some of that cool air into the ER.

I seldom stop for progress photos in the heat of battle. Else I would have shot the heat exchanger, or the strainer enclosures. But I have this one of the intact impeller, because I can't get my eye next to it, so I need to use mirrors and cameras to see it.

I got the cover off the water pump and found the impeller completely intact. This was actually a bit disappointing, because it was the most likely cause and also nearly the simplest to fix. I put the pump back together and was about to start on the sea strainer, which almost never has anything in it, when the air conditioning quit. High pressure alarms on all the units meant that this, too, was not getting cooling water. Sure enough, a check of the overboard discharge revealed no flow, and even the generator flow was weak, with the generator temperature slowly rising.

This was revealing. The main engine has its own pump and strainer, and the generator and AC each have their own pumps, but share a strainer. There is nothing in common among all of these except the sea chest.  Occam's razor suggested that we had some kind of obstruction in the sea chest, and so Louise called the nearby Hinkley yard to see if they had a diver while I continued through the motions of ruling everything else out.

I found both sea strainers, normally nearly empty, packed with crud. But even after emptying both, cleaning them out thoroughly, and reinstalling, we still had no stabilizer water flow from the main engine, nor any main air conditioning on the generator. The generator would run, but we could see the exhaust water was inadequate, and the coolant temperature climbed to 200°. Still, we were getting charge into the batteries and were able to run the pilothouse air conditioner, making the upstairs livable.

Main engine strainer, packed with vegetation. Louise shot this for a Whatsapp thread.

On the chance that any debris made it through the strainer, I opened up the main engine heat exchanger and cleaned it out. This is a fiddly process that first involves disconnecting the alternator and removing its cables, but I felt it was a necessary step. I found no problems even when rodding out a couple dozen of the tubes, of which there are probably a hundred.

By this time we were now 100% certain we had obstructions in the sea chest, and I started looking for other divers, since Hinkley never called us back. I got recommendations from Brent and from local friend Ben and eventually found a guy who said he could come out some time in the morning. I buttoned everything up and we tendered back to The Boathouse at dinner time for another beer and a light snack.

The tide had been coming in all day, since we first left Fort Myers, but after dinner it started to go out, adding to the river current. We again found ourselves pulling the anchor ever so slowly through the mud, and we knew we'd have a sleepless night unless we put out more chain. This time it meant starting the engine and moving upriver a bit, but with the impeller already checked and not enough time for the engine to even get hot, it was not an issue. We ended up sitting in exactly the same place, but with another 50' of chain on the bottom.

The generator/AC strainer was worse. In the bucket is the stuff that was above the basket that I had to remove by hand. It smelled as bad as it looks, too.

We then had a comfortable night, although I will say the Wilson Pigott Bridge is about the noisiest bridge we've ever heard. It's busy, and the grid deck must have enough loose parts that there is a mighty rattle with every passing vehicle. If we ever stop here again for a visit or to eat at the restaurant, we'll anchor a bit further upriver.

We'd been running the pilothouse air conditioning, which can run on the inverter and does not use seawater cooling, on and off all day in the heat, and we had a nervous couple of hours running the generator with marginal cooling to recharge the batteries for the night. The temperature held, hovering at 200°, which is below the shutdown threshold, and the exhaust gas that is normally mitigated by water was terrible, but we made it through.

It had never really occurred to me before, but we now know that the sea chest is a single point of failure. I've always had confidence that we could make power, however inefficiently, with the main engine should the generator fail, and vice-versa, with completely separate controls, wiring, plumbing, etc.. Oh, sure, our single engine is also a single point of failure, but apart from it quitting at inopportune moments, we never really need to be underway. But we faced the real possibility here that we would be without battery power, without an ability to recharge or to safely move to a dock with a power outlet.

A Facebook follower snapped this as we approached the Miserable Mile. Photo: Jill Abramson 

Everything from the ability to restart engines, to the navigation equipment, to the refrigerator full of a household's worth of food depends on that power. We can wait indefinitely for engine repairs, but not for electricity. I'm not a big fan of those little suitcase generators, but this has me thinking about them. Or perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and put some solar panels over the soft top.

The generator again held for an hour in the morning to tide us over until the diver arrived, which was around 10:20. I tendered over to the restaurant docks to pick him up. He got right to work, going down with calipers to measure the sea chest cover bolts. I handed him one of my box-end wrenches, and he spent maybe fifteen minutes down there removing a ton of debris. He told us there was a "birds nest" at each of the intake pipes leading off the sea chest.

In ten years and 54,000 nautical miles, this is the first time this has ever happened. Normally the sea chest intake grate keeps all the big debris out, and we seldom even have any material in the sea strainers. The only explanation I could come up with is that, in one of our shallow anchorages, we must have rested up against a submerged bush or tree right on the sea chest, and the suction of the generator and air conditioner pumps, or maybe even the main engine pump when we started up, sucked enough of it through the grate to fill the whole sea chest and occlude the inlets.

This may look like a cloud at first glance, but it is smoke from a sugar cane burn. Glad to have this behind us now.

I had asked the diver in Key West who had cleaned our hull to inspect the sea chest through the grate, and he reported it clear. And nothing was overheating until a couple of days ago. So this likely happened somewhere between St. Pete and Fort Myers.

Because I know someone will ask, we do have our own dive equipment on board, including a hookah rig that I made expressly for the purpose of taking care of underwater maintenance in remote places. And had we been completely on our own, I could have gone under the boat to do this myself. I might even have done so just for experience had it happened in warm, clear waters such as the Keys. But I'm a recreational diver, just barely on top of controlling my breathing and buoyancy, and working in murky water and strong current, fumbling with tools, is really more appropriately handled by a professional diver used to those conditions and tasks. Not to mention the alligators.

Everything worked straight away once the sea chest was back together, and after dropping the diver off at the dock we got underway right at lunch time. The tiki place was already in full swing. But at 11:45, we were really too late to make Moore Haven by the end of the day. We blasted right past LaBelle, which had been our planned provision stop. I did, at least, fuel the tender at Hinkley before we left.

Our coffee view this morning. Yes we are that close to the dam.

Franklin lock, with its busted gates, was painfully slow, and I had to stay on the gas the rest of the day to make the last lockage at Ortona Lock. We dropped the hook in the upper pool just upriver of the dam (map). We splashed the tender and made our way down the secret canal to the Ortona Tavern, which was the Shady Gator the last time we were there. The food was good, they had cold beer in bottles, and we mostly had the place to ourselves, even on a Friday night. They gave us a couple of coffee creamers since we were never able to pick up milk.

The game shelf at Ortona Tavern. We both cracked up over "LaBelle-opoly."

We got an early start this morning so we could get all the way across the lake and still make the last lockage at Port Mayaca. As we were having our coffee the lock passed through 11 bass boats upbound, we presume for some bass fishing tournament in the lake. On a pleasant Saturday we expected the lake and the rim canal to be chock-a-block with them, but honestly the traffic has been light. Maybe the 20-25 knot winds on the lake kept some folks away.

Update: As usual I could not finish under way and we are now anchored just upriver of the railroad lift bridge in Port Mayaca (map). This is a new spot for us; we expected to tie to the dolphins, but the canal has dropped with the lake to the point where there is barely six feet of water there, and the aforementioned wind made tying up a challenge. After three missed approaches we waved off and came here instead, a spot where we simply would not fit at higher water levels.

We bashed through three-footers on the beam through the second half of the lake, but we're very glad to have the lake and its shallow spots behind us. Louise made Cajun pasta for dinner, which we had with some delicious homemade sourdough gifted to us by Karen when we saw them a couple of weeks ago -- it does really well in the freezer.

Homemade sourdough with dinner. Thanks, Karen.

In the morning we will continue downriver to Stuart, where we hope to rest and recuperate a couple of days after the big push to beat the falling lake level. I need to line up some yard work, and we need to start making our way out of Florida. Barring more boat drama, my next post will be somewhere on our northbound journey up the east coast.

Bonus photo: tonight's anchorage. Yes, we are that close to the rip-rap.