Day 270-271 New sail, new standing rigging testing, Happy sailing, Refrigerator compressor replacement, water inlet installation.

 New main sail, new Shrouds.

Sailing morning.

 Saturday morning we hoisted new sail and get out for sea trail new standing rigging.

 

 

 

We went out today in 15–20 knots of wind. It was a great sail. Unfortunately, the weather didn't give us a chance to hoist the full mainsail, so we spent most of the day cruising at about 5–56 knots with the first reef in the main and just the "corner" of the jib.

At one point a stronger gust hit—probably around 20+ knots—and the boat heeled all the way to the toe rail. Nothing excessive, just a normal reaction to a decent gust.

About 5–10 minutes later I heard the bilge pump alarm. I jumped into the cabin and found 2–3 inches of water under the cabin sole. My boat has a very shallow bilge, so even 5–10 gallons of water creates a pretty dramatic-looking situation.

My first thought was, "Houston, we have a problem." Since we weren't far from the marina, my immediate reaction was, "Let's head back." But that feeling was quickly replaced by curiosity. Where was all this water coming from?

A quick taste test gave the answer—it was fresh water.

I immediately realized what had happened. I had forgotten to close the refill valve between the main water tank in the V-berth and the smaller day tank on the port side. As a result, the water level in the forward tank rose above the top of the vent line, and water simply poured out through the tank vent and into the bilge.

Then our stress changed by laughing and we had rest of the day nice sailing hours.

Refrigerator

Four years ago I installed the guts from a domestic refrigerator to cool my icebox. It worked surprisingly well for several years of lake sailing, but a few days in Galveston Bay finally finished it off.

The problem is that a household refrigerator compressor has both the motor and compressor suspended inside the housing on springs. At sea, especially in "washing machine" conditions (about 2-foot waves with a 3-second period), the assembly was being thrown around so much that one of the hot wires eventually rubbed through its insulation and shorted to the compressor case. The next time it got wet, the compressor failed completely.

I knew from the beginning that this setup wouldn't last forever on a boat. It was also a 120 V compressor, and my long-term plan had always been to replace it with a proper 12 V marine/RV compressor. Well, that time finally came.

Brazing refrigeration tubing on an FRP boat isn't exactly the safest job, so I took plenty of precautions. I kept a fire extinguisher next to me, and my son stood by with a water hose just in case. I covered the work area with a carbon felt welding blanket and used a small flame deflector that concentrated the torch heat on the tubing instead of blasting heat everywhere.

The first time I did this job, I didn't have the flame deflector. Keeping the torch under control was much harder, and I relied only on wet rags to protect the surrounding fiberglass. Looking back, I was playing pretty close to the edge.

This time the brazing took only about five minutes. Everything went smoothly, calmly, and much more professionally.

After that, I pulled a vacuum on the system for about 20 minutes and charged it with the required 1.8 oz of R-134a. Everything went exactly as planned.

 

The refrigerator was loaded with about 20 bottles of beer and cider, so it took some time to pull everything down to temperature. After about four hours of hard work, the compressor finally started cycling while maintaining 5°C inside the box.

All of this testing was done with the compressor limited to just 60 W.  Since it uses a BLDC motor, it is capable of running at a much higher speed if needed. At this point, I'm not sure whether there is any real benefit to running it at full power. Next time I'll let it run much longer until the entire system reaches thermal equilibrium, then I'll measure the average power consumption over time. That should give me a much better idea of how efficient the new setup really is.

Water system 

Two weeks ago I installed a fresh water fill controller that automatically shuts off the water as soon as the tank is full and sounds an alarm to remind me to disconnect the shore water supply.

Today I installed a proper shore water inlet, so I no longer have to feed the hose through the hatch and crawl under the V-berth every time I want to fill the tank.

The connection between the inlet and the tank is made with permanent plumbing, making the whole process much quicker, cleaner, and far more convenient.