Repowering and Hull Cleaning

Yesterday I had a meeting with Mac and Neil, the father and son team who own and operate the marina. As Bob has suggested they were down to earth, straight talking, and very helpful. The marina's repowering of Pachuca was not an issue and seemed to be taken for granted. Mac spent a lot of time discussing my propeller because he was very concerned with the selection of the correct transmission ratio. We then spent 20 minutes discussing the procedure for importation of the engine. Without going into details, there is affiliated company that will take care of the paperwork and delivery and even source the engine if that is what I want. The engine would be delivered to a transportation company in San Diego and trucked to the marina. For them it has been a tried and true system in which they have confidence.

They seem to do the repowering with the boats in the water rather than dry land. The boat would be towed (if the SABB isn't running) to a jetty where they would lift out the engine. Then it would be towed to a slip in the marina where the installation would be performed.

Mac told me to expect the entire process to take 3 months, which I am hoping was an overly cautious estimate. I've been told elsewhere that the engine installation itself takes about 2 weeks. Also, the labor charges are somewhere in the $25-$30 per hour range.

The next task was mine: engine selection. I got back to the boat and went over the figures and discovered that the 40 HP 3 cylinder Yanmar that I had my sights on was much too wide for my engine compartment, particularly when we included the alternator. The only two options that I could see were either the smaller Yanmar 30 HP or another brand.

If I change brands then I will have to revisit Mac and Neil because the seem to work mainly with Yanmars.

I did some more diving. My primary objective was to read some numbers that are supposed to be stamped in the boss of the propeller. These numbers will describe the pitch of the propeller, among other things. I worked hard at cleaning the propeller and although I could see remarkably well I could not see stamped numbers anywhere.

While I was doing this I felt scratches from small barnacles well below the waterline so I started to experiment with scrubbing the hull. Using the boarding ladder as a base I cleaned the aft third of the port side using a long handled mop to remove the slime and then a small piece of wood to scrape off the scores of small barnacles that had attached themselves. I figure that I can clean the entire hull with a total of 6 hours of work. ... I've already grumbled about my profound disappointment with the very expensive anti fouling job I had done in Port Townsend.