Daddy decided to stay at the motel today while I hung out with my $75/hr mechanic. The three hour job of replacing the a/c unit turned into a four to five hour job. The unit is very small and it sits in a very small space under the galley counter. The opening to the very small space is even smaller. When I picked the unit up at Mermaid yesterday they described the best technician as someone standing about 3 feet tall with an 8 foot reach consisting of strong skinny arms with several elbows on each.... this would be advantages to reaching places that.... well, need to be reached. My tech, Tim, doesn't fit that description however he did a good job, one of the reasons it took longer than anticipated is because he had not anticipated installing the larger water pump I bought with the a/c unit. I bought the pump because the Mermaid folks stressed the importance of pumping large amounts of water through the coils to insure proper performance. These marine a/c units are not air cooled like a residential system, heat is transferred away from the system by drawing water from outside the boat over the coils and dumped back out again. Remember, you cool a space by removing heat.
Anyway, the old unit did come out of the very small space and the new unit did go in.
Once that job was completed we worked on replacing the three fuel filters. The filters are in series therefore the first one picks up most debris that may be encountered, the others are changed on a less frequent basis. We replaced all three for a good baseline. This took a lot longer than anticipated as well but we finally got the engine started and running smoothly after some initial fuel flow issues.
Next we "polished" the diesel fuel. This is done by using a pump and hoses to pull fuel from the tank, running it through a couple of filters then dumping back into the tank. When diesel sits for a long time algae will begin to grow, as I understand it, algae doesn't burn as well as deisel fuel thereby causing the engine to die. That's something we don't want to happen, especially when there's only one engine. All in all Tim spent about 11 hours with me and I spent about $700 for his time, expertise and training.... I learned quite a bit.
I picked Daddy up and we went to Publics in order to stock the galley shelves. I traversed the isles looking for canned goods such as soup, milk, meat, beans, fruits and so forth, packaged goods such as cereal, popcorn, chips and bread, also a few items that need to be keep cold such as milk, cheese and lunch meat. As I've noted before, I don't trust the refrigerator so we're going to be using a cooler for the cold stuff.
I'll be picking Bill up at 8:00 and we plan to shove off around 9:00... we'll stop a short distance down the way at Melbourne Harbour for fuel. We'll then head further south on the ICW to St Lucie where we'll jump across Floridia using the Okeechobee waterway to reach the Gulf.
Hopefully this will be our last night at the Super 8.
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