Escape from the Rio Dulce (2004)

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

015-39.060 N
089-0.120 W

Ahoy from the crew of the BlueJacket. I'm sure that those of you who know us well think that we've fallen off the face of the Earth or failed to keep the pointy side up. Well, neither of those is true. We've been "stuck" in the Rio Dulce resolving a series of issues before heading out. The term "stuck" is a misnomer. We've had a great time here and have made a lot of good friends.

The area is beautiful. Most mornings I get up a little after 6, take my laptop down to the restaurant (where the wireless connection reaches) and get e-mail while watching the sun rise over the river. Normally I can watch flocks of green parrots fly over, hear howler monkeys across the river, and watch fishermen paddle their dugouts up the river. It's just beautiful!

There's a hot waterfall nearby which is fed by volcanic hot springs. Depending upon where you sit you can adjust how hot it is. If you go up river you're treated fantastic scenery as you're in the middle of a deep canyon which is strewn with huge boulders. It's not for the feint of heart or those with poor balance, but it's fantastic scenery. About 1/2 of a mile in you come to a grotto where a cave with a river flowing out of it is located. We had flashlights with us and explored the cave. After swimming several hundred yards into the cave we found a waterfall pouring out of a hole. We were able to climb above it, but as we didn't have the correct equipment, we didn't explore further. Wow, that was cool!

We've also gotten quite involved with the marina. As usual the staff at Tortugal Marina had changed since we left and the new staff (Rob, Manfred & Andrea) appeared to have their hearts in all of the right places, but needed a lot of help with the business aspect. We've spent hours and hours working on their books, billing, pricing, goal setting, business models, etc with them. Their computer network and Internet connections were a real mess and I've gotten that all taken care of.

We've also gotten to be quite good friends with some of our fellow boaters. I quickly became known as the resident computer expert and it seems that everyone around here had computer issues. I helped install a refrigeration system in a boat that has never had refrigeration, and believe me, they were happy campers when it worked! Sue and Margery (from Island Time) have pretty much adopted the two marina dogs, Joe Friday and Mancha. They've been washing, feeding and caring for the dogs, and they look great. We regularly have the dogs camped out at our boat and most people think that we own them.

One major problem was that we had was the complete, sudden failure of the laptop's hard drive. Nothing was recoverable off of it. Luckily Sue's folks were flying into Guatemala City so we decided to have them bring a drive with them and meet them. Sue had been a bit homesick for her parents, so this was definately a case of turning lemons into lemonade. We met them in Guatemala City and then went to Antigua and Chichicastenango where we had a wonderful time. I've restored the system, but we've lost all of our SailMail and any mail to geoffschultz.org since we got here. So if you sent some mail and didn't get a reply, please resend it as we may have lost it.

At this point every known project for the boat is finished and things are working very well. However we've decided to push the trip to the South Pacific off by a year as I've installed so many new systems and I don't feel that they're sufficiently debugged as of yet. As difficult as it is to get parts down here, it's even harder in the South Pacific or the Pacific coast of Central America. The South Pacific will still be there next year.

Our current plan is to cruise in the Belize/Honduras area for this season. We plan to pull out of Tortugal tomorrow or on Sunday. The weather finally looks good. So, the next time that you hear from us, we should be in Belize! If you're interested in what kept us here so long, read on, otherwise stop here.

-- Geoff & Sue

Those of you with good memories will recall that last July I replaced the 120V refrigeration system with a 12V system that I designed and built out of components. The system ran OK, but I felt that it wasn't performing up to par. It also developed a leak at a cold plate fitting which I thought that I resolved before we left. When we came back the system ran for a week or so but then ran low on refrigerant.

After multiple attempts I must have sealed the leak, but then I started chasing a phantom leak which I spent ages looking for. After endless frustrating weeks I found that my electronic leak detector was responding to liquid leak detector "soap" that you can place on joints to visually detect a leak (just like what you'd use on an inner tube.) It takes about 2 days to make a change to the system as you have to let it warm up, make the change, vacuum it down, re pressurize it, and observe the effect of the change. Eventually I realized that my leak was resolved and then I turned to tuning the system.

Boat refrigeration is a lot different than home refrigeration. First off, on a boat you're running off of batteries and you need to have the system be as efficient as possible. Next, boats use holding plates, which in our case are 24x10x3" plates which are filled with a liquid that freezes 26F in the refrigerator and 0F in the freezer. The plates have tubes in them through which refrigerant flows and freezes the liquid. The contents of the refrigerator/freezer are chilled as the plates defrost.

BlueJacket had 2 refrigeration systems; a 12V system and an engine drive system. I had always thought that this was wonderful as you have a backup in case one stops working. That's true, but there's a big tradeoff: there are 2 sets of tubes which run through the plates and only 1/2 of them are in use at any given time. The 12V tubes were in the back and the engine drive were in the front. You need to freeze the entire plate and it gets very hard to do that when the tubes are a long way from the liquid that needs to get frozen.

I started a whole set of tuning experiments and it became obvious that the system wasn't performing well. It was taking too long to freeze the plates. After a while I discovered that there's an air gap at the top of the plate to allow for freezing expansion and the people who installed the original system mounted the thermostats there! Duh! I moved the thermostats to the sides of the plates and got much better readings. This helped, but the system was still running too long. After much soul searching I decided to rip out the engine drive system and combine the two refrigerant cooling loops.

This was much easier said than done as down here it's next to impossible to get simple parts. For example, simple unions, which are used to solder 2 pieces of tubing together are non existent. I spent the better part of a day searching for a 1/4" union and finally made it out of a piece of 5/16" tubing that I was able to flare out with a punch that I had. I was able to find 90 degree elbows, but forget a T. I scrounged pieces off of the engine drive system and was *just* able to come up with enough parts to do it.

I reassembled the system and after finding a couple of leaks was amazed at how well it ran. I could take a 24x12x3" plate from 80F to -15F in a little more than an hour. After some more experiments I realized that the existing mechanical thermostats didn't provide sufficient resolution so I had some electronic ones shipped down with someone coming to visit. The new ones allowed me to precisely set the on/off temperatures for each plate as well as reading the air temp. I've spent days and days graphing plate temperatures to determine where to place the sensors to determine when the plates are fully frozen and sufficiently thawed. Believe me, it's not as easy as one thinks. My goal is to have the system run for 2-3 hours per day and maintain the refrigerator at 40F and the freezer at 20 or below.

Other projects included upgrading the RayMarine autopilot computer from a type 300 to the latest So model. I also installed dual electronic compasses and new wind instruments. I replaced the my unreliable Trace C40 voltage controller (for the solar and wind generators) with a MorningStar TriStar controller, and I'm very happy with the new one. Of course it has a computer interface that doesn't work with USB serial ports (guess who told them about that one.) As part of preventative maintenance I replaced the steering chain and cable and as I was just about to install the new one I realized that they sent me a 3/16" cable instead of 1/4". Doesn't sound like much, but it is. So I reused the old cable, but had to re-engineer the connectors as they wouldn't fit on the new one! That was only a day project that I get to repeat when I bring the new cable back! Oh, I battled SSB problems, installed a bushing on the wind generator that I machined on a lathe out of UHMW, replaced some parts of the ground tackle, sewed sails, replaced batons, wired, wired and did more wiring, modified the water intake for the water maker to keep it from ingesting air, had a wonderful motor lift built which goes on the wind generator tower, and lots more projects whose detail I can't remember or look up as I lost the records on the old hard drive.

Pretty much this has been work, work, and work on other people's boats, but it's been fun. I love this area, but I can't wait to get out cruising.

-- Geoff
Log ID: 445