Port Isabel, Texas is a great community located in south Texas and we hate to leave but the lack of depth in the bays and the 6 hour drive from home (Houston) forces us to change our sailing grounds. I’ll miss the Laguna Madre Yacht Club members and their camaraderie, especially the companionship and tall tales over a beer with Pat Soddy whom was very helpful in providing support while I fixed and updated Sephyr, a 28′ Cape Dory. I will definitely return for a visit in the near future.
A Work in Progress
I started planning the move from Port Isabel to Seabrook, Texas the day we purchased Zephyr. The master plan was to get the engine fixed, update electronics, test sail her a few times in the local waters and then sail away. As always when you buy a boat you can’t put a fixed schedule to anything involving the boat, specially when the vessel is over 40 years old and sourcing engine parts are next to impossible.
The venerable Volvo MD7A diesel is a reliable but old monster which has out lived many owners but is now only found in a few old well kept boats or in junkyards being parted out to maintain the few still remaining in service. Acquiring parts and fixing the Volvo took a good part of six months but once done it fired up and ran smoothly. The simplicity of this engine makes it reliable to this day. It’s “Achilles heel” is the raw water cooling system. Rust is the mortal enemy and a rinse of fresh water at the end of the day is the best abatement to keep rust at bay.
Although Zephyr came with two polycrystalline 75w solar panels and a controller, the panels were heavy, the frame jutted above the bimini which the boom would hit and the controller was dated and overcharged the batteries. In short, this system was also changed to a Victron SmartSolar MPPT 100/20 controller with a Victron SmartShunt to monitor power consumption and two ultra thin and more efficient monocrystalline 100w solar panels. This charging system is connected to 100 amp/h wet cell battery that runs the house and navigation. In the future I plan to change this to a Lithium Ion system and have the full 100amps available rather than the limitation on the wet cell. Battery/Solar power use is monitored via the bluetooth apps which Victron supplies. I would highly recommend this simple system for it’s simplicity and ease of installation and use.
Another fix required was to the ProFurl lower drum which was seized and did not allow the jib to deploy. This took a bit of shade tree mechanics and lots of online ‘googling’ to find the correct way to disassemble and replace and source the inner bearings. The replacement kit supplied came with one bearing but once I opened the unit I found that two were were actually required. At this point Amazon Prime came to the rescue and I was able to find sealed bearings with the same (size) specifications.
A very old Garmin GPS unit was also replaced with a new full color 7 inch Garmin display screen with up-to-date charts, NMEA 2000 and depth transducer. It makes a world of difference to have so much information available compared to the 800×640 B/W pixel based units of yesteryear. The VHF was also replaced and a new Standard Horizon with AIS was installed which communicates via NMEA200 with the Garmin GPS to display the AIS targets. The electronics work perfectly and the NMEA2000 binds everything together nicely.