What do you do on a beautiful day in paradise? Get dirty? We had a few boat projects that needed to be completed in calm weather (no wind and no swell). So, we set out to do some maintenance and servicing of both Sugar Shack and Sweetie (our dinghy).
Anchored in calm waters with very little breeze made it much easier to accomplish these specific projects. We dropped the hook at North Totegegie where we had beautiful views.
Windlass Service
What is a windlass? It is an electric wench that raises and lowers our anchor and anchor chain. It is a very important part of our boat as it would make anchoring nearly impossible without it. In a pinch, we can manually raise and lower our anchor using the hand crank method. However, we have 100 meters of 10mm stainless steel chain attached to a Spade x140 anchor that weighs in at over 65lbs. Imagine cranking all that chain and anchor up by hand – no thank you!
Our Lewmar Ocean 3 windlass (2000 watt) was running a little slow when raising the chain. Once it got going it was fine, but the startup was less than optimal. Not a problem, just needed a little love. We are at anchor with our anchor chain connected to the windlass. Can’t rightly service the windlass without removing the anchor chain, right? First things first, Matt ties a line to the last link of chain (just at the rode) and then secures it to the anchor roller so he could remove the pressure off the windlass. Then he jumped in the hole (locker) and cleaned the brushes and removed the corrosion.
Not yet at 100%…it might require a more comprehensive servicing in a month or two. For now, it is better than it was and that is good for us (maybe at 95%). A few days later, Matt took the windlass apart and cleaned all the connections. He found a loose wire that was the culprit and now the windlass is running perfectly!
Tail Tails
Do you know what a tail tail is? It doesn’t have anything to do with your posterior or an animal. A tail tail on a boat is an indicator of how your sails are trimmed while underway. They are small, light pieces of fabric attached to the sail. When the sail is trimmed correctly, the tail tails on the windward (inside) and leeward (outside) of the sail will stream backwards. That’s when life is good. If the sail needs trimming the tail tail will either fly up or down indicating the need to tighten or loosen the jib sheet (working line) to give you optimal performance.
Our tail tails were very sad and in need of servicing. Easy enough job when there is no wind. Matt had to drop the sail onto the deck in order reach all the tail tails. You don’t want to do this in windy conditions as your jib will be flopping all over the place. We bought a kit which made replacing them super easy.
Washdown Pump
Our Jabsco washdown pump is located in a locker near the mast. This pump provides pressure to our hose to enable us to wash down the boat, the anchor chain and pretty much anything we need. It is great because we can use it with salt water or fresh water depending on how the valve is turned. We usually hose things off first with salt water, then do a final rinse with fresh water. Why is that? Because we have an abundance of salt water and a very limited amount of fresh water. Our pump was very corroded as it is in and around salt water and salty air. It worked, but it was limping along. Instead of ‘servicing’ we decided to replace her.
The pump is only attached with a few screws and clamps. Matt had it replaced in under an hour.
Servicing Sweetie – Our Dinghy
I had intended on putting the work done to service Sweetie on this blog, but it was so extensive that I ended up giving it her own blog post. Stay tuned for “Dinghy Spa for Sweetie.”
Events from this blog post occurred during the month of January 2021. Our blog posts run 8 weeks behind our adventures.
Hey there fellow 471’ers! SV Lemonade crew here, on C471 #58 🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♂️
We’re just newbies compared to you guys. We purchased in 2020, refitted until the summer of 2022 which is when we moved aboard (permanently), so still kind of getting to know her but so far so good! Love to see / read how you’ve been living on Sugar Shack for so long and that is also exactly our intention with Lemonade 🙏
We ended up on your blog by sheer coincidence, as we are dealing with a similar windlass issue as you describe here, with exactly the same windlass, except in our case it will cease altogether from time to time 😣 Not only when raising, but even while dropping 🤔
We’ve been anchoring in muddy grounds during the winter, so presumably we’ve had some mud / clay / gunk accumulate in and around the internals. So, we figured, let’s take it apart and give it a clean! Which is where we are hitting a wall… How the heck do you take this thing fully apart? Unscrewing the cap doesn’t get you very far, and neither does taking out the bolts. We’ve been searching the net for 2 days now on how to disassemble the Ocean 3, but to no avail. And that’s when we stumbled onto your blogpost here! However, unfortunately still without the missing key that were looking for 😅
Would you guys mind pointing us into the right direction of how to get to the guts of this thing?
Cheers from Portugal,
Nancy & Lex
Hello Nancy and Lex, thank you for reaching out to us. I will send you an email but if for some reason you do not hear from me you can reach us at christine@svSugarShack.com.