I’m still thinking about what I’ll do when I get the boat to Seattle to solve the problem of crud (barnacles) growing in the sea water intakes and hoses. When we were on our run south to Costa Rica, the water was so warm (89 degrees) that my thru-hulls, hoses, strainer, and sea chest all became a breeding ground for crud. I spoke with a boat mechanic at Los Suenos who said he had a good business cleaning out the intake hoses on boats, every two weeks!
I don’t want to deal with this in the future and am looking at all options to avoid it. Here’s a posting from the Trawlers and Trawlering list on this topic:
Yesterday, I posted a picture of our dog Shelby in her “stroller”, which caused a regular reader of my blog (a Nordhavn owner) to send a picture of his dog Gulliver, who co-pilots for him, at sea, and in the air!
-Ken Williams
I don’t want to deal with this in the future and am looking at all options to avoid it. Here’s a posting from the Trawlers and Trawlering list on this topic:
I don’t know if I’ll try this, because I don’t like anything that constrains the flow.. but, it’s an interesting idea.Why go thru all the trouble, expense & hassle of Chlorine… Do what we do here in the barnacle capital of the world….Florida… Just As we do here, in the A/C strainers, just drop in a couple of scrap pieces, an inch or 2 long, of copper tubing, into the strainer & forget it.. The ion exchange of the copper into the seawater keeps the crawlee’s from attaching to anything, especially in the A/C cooling where the cooling line is small & can get clogged with barnacles & green goo…. Simple things always work the best……………Ken, Tampa
Yesterday, I posted a picture of our dog Shelby in her “stroller”, which caused a regular reader of my blog (a Nordhavn owner) to send a picture of his dog Gulliver, who co-pilots for him, at sea, and in the air!
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-Ken Williams
2 Responses
You are right — an alarm should have gone off, but none did. I only noticed that the raw water cooling system was failing when the air conditioning completely refused to run. The chillers were overheating immediately and shutting down. Luckily they failed, because I could live without them, but it just as easily could have been the hydraulic system overheating, in which case I would have had no thrusters or stabilizers.
Getting proper sensoring on the raw water cooling system will be a priority this winter.
-Ken W
When you were having trouble keeping your engine(s) cool, why didn’t a low water alarm go off informing you that the sea chest was the problem? It seems like a pretty crucial piece of information to have!