More Boat Maintenance in Paradise

We stayed a couple of days in the East Lemons anchorage, helping our friends on Caliente with their engine problem.

Our cell phones no longer get a signal out here (Movistar service), so the Iridium satellite phone was invaluable in calling Panama City and Miami for parts & information.

The problem Dave and John were working on was associated with alternators and the drive shaft. Apparently John had added a big alternator some time back, but not properly mounted it, and moved some as the engine was running. The movement caused wear on the splines of the pulley that drove the alternator but also drove the water pump that cooled the engine. He dismounted the alternator (he has a generator he can use for battery charging), but needed to examine the situation closely before he continued.
Losing his engine cooling halfway to Honduras wouldn't be a good thing at all. Dave was also worried that he might damage the crankshaft, which would be a major deal to repair.

The big obstacle was that the nut holding the whole assembly together was huge, and nobody in this end of the San Blas had a socket of the right size (1 11/16). And the nut was recessed, so several clever suggestions by Dave and others to get the nut off were useless.

John finally called Arturo, the guy who runs Marine Warehouse in Panama City, and asked him to go find a socket and send it to us out here via one of the puddle-jumper airlines that fly into Porvenir. Amazingly, the socket arrived 2 days later. John still doesn't know exactly what Arturo charged him for the service, but it was invaluable.

We loaded up both crews on Soggy Paws and took a day trip over to Porvenir (about 5 miles from the East Lemons) to pick up the socket from the airport. We needed to check in there anyway to pay our Kuna Yala cruising fee. And besides the parts, Caliente was out of rum, and we were also looking for a Cable and Wireless cell phone sim card. We found a nice Kuna-run restaurant on what used to be Smithsonian Island (2 islands west of the one with the airport) for lunch.

Within an hour after returning to his boat, John had the nut off and he and Dave took a good look at the situation. They decided that the situation wasn't too bad, and that removing the big alternator, adding a big washer as a shim, and properly torquing down the nut, would make things good enough for John to make it to Honduras/Guatemala without too much trouble. We motored for about 3 hours yesterday and John says the engine seems fine now.

Also while we were sitting there waiting for John to resolve his engine problems, Dave saw another boat in the anchorage with a Tohatsu 18HP (same basic model as our 15). He went over and talked to the guy and asked to take a look under the cover at the throttle linkage. He also got a Parts Manual on CD, to complement our service manual.

The guy also said he'd had a similar problem with his motor while it was still under warranty. After a lot of diagnosing, the cause turned out to be the wires running from the throttle to the rest of the ignition system. When the throttle was twisted, sometimes, two wires touched together, causing intermittent problems. He's going to check this out soon.

Dave still hasn't had a chance to try out the new pulsar coil for the outboard that John picked up for us in Panama City. But when he took resistance readings on the new coil, it reads the same as the old one. So he isn't hopeful that it will solve the problem.

We are still (theortically) only an hour away from firing up the watermaker for the first time. That's probably job one on OUR list, once Caliente leaves and we get a few days to sit and catch up on our own maintenance issues.