AquaFennatic Great Loop Blog: Still in New Baltimore New York

Jun 13^th – It was another extremely hot and mostly sunny day with moderate winds. We’re still at Shady Harbor Marina and it looks like we’ll have to stay longer … I can hear people saying “Why”? Well … I tackled more boat jobs … adding distilled water to the batteries, checking all the boat fluid levels, cleaning out all the sea strainers and then checking for loose nuts and bolts in the engine compartment … and then I found a broken motor mount on the starboard side of the port engine. This is the same engine that had a broken motor mount replaced in Green Turtle Bay. After they replaced the broken motor mount I believed we still had issues and called the Service department at Green Turtle Bay but they told me our engine was aligned properly. Well something is causing the issue thus first we have to locate a replacement part and then we’ll need to identify the root cause. It appears that we’ll be stuck here for a number of days until it’s fixed and hopefully we identify why we’ve broken 2 motor mounts on the same engine. The mechanic here seems to be knowledgeable, however there is only one mechanic at this marina thus he’s extremely busy. I’ll be doing some of the grunt work myself to help him as well as help me reduce the labour cost. At the end of the day we said our goodbyes to Scott & Karen (“Last Call”) since they’ll be leaving early in the morning to head for the Erie Canal. Once we get up and running again we’ll be following the Champlain Canal route.

Jun 14^th – It was a warm sunny windy day. We’re still at Shady Harbor Marina waiting for our replacement motor mount to arrive. Apparently it should be here sometime tomorrow, however the mechanic may not be available to install it until Friday morning. This morning I disconnected the coupler between the prop shaft and the transmission and the good news is that the alignment was good between the motor and the shaft. Once we install the motor mount we’ll need to test it to see if we’re still getting a vibration … if so maybe our underwater gear has an issue. We also lost our inside lighting on our aft deck a while back thus I tried to determine the issue today. I found some ground issues however it seems that power isn’t making through the hard top … perhaps there’s a break in the wire some where??? Oh well, I decided to leave the rest of the job for another day since it will be a big job to run a new wire from the flybridge into the hardtop … a job for another day.

Jun 15^th – It was a warm day with a mix of sun and clouds with the winds progressively increasing throughout the day with late day showers. Yep … we’re still in Shady Harbor Marina. The replacement motor mount arrived today and Pete, the mechanic, installed it while I did some of the grunt work. Everything went well and the engine is in alignment and the test run proved that the underwater gear is aligned as well. The port engine has a bit of a vibration when running at high RPMs thus the mechanic recommended that we have a Volvo diesel mechanic give the engine a good tune up when we get home. It was a rainy evening thus we had dinner on the boat and watched a movie. You’ll notice I’ve added a few old pictures that were taken by “Last Call” since we’ve been busy with our boat fixes.