The Gypsies in the Palace blog has been moved to Blogspot. The direct link is http://mvgypsiesinthepalace.blogspot.com. You can, as always, get to it from the website, www.gypsiesinthepalace.net. The old posts are being moved over and cleaned up as quickly as I can but that takes time. To see old posts, with pictures, you can continue to come here until they are all moved. All new posts will be put on Blogspot.
Cheers,
The Captain
Add comment February 2nd, 2009
Doug here,
One of the most complicated and critical systems on a boat is the electrical system. Complicated because you must maintain a system that uses 110 volt alternating current (like general household current – “110 VAC”) and 12 volt direct current (like a car – “12 VDC”). Some things on a boat such as refrigerators, air conditioners, hot water heaters and miscellaneous appliances use the 110 VAC and most marine systems such as navigation equipment use the 12 VDC. The second reason it is complicated is that you need 110 VAC to charge the batteries on the boat that produce the 12 VDC. A boat gets access to 110 VAC in three primary ways. One, by being connected to a dock and plugging into what is called shore power. Two, by running a diesel engine onboard called a Generator or Genset for short. This generator is connected to an alternator that creates 110 VAC power. Three, each main engine has an alternator connected to it that takes power from the engine and converts it into 110 VAC. The third complexity is that at times you don’t have access to 110 VAC power so you have to convert some of the 12 VDC power in the battery bank into 110 VAC using a device called an inverter so that you can keep the refrigerator and, more importantly, the ice maker working.
When we bought Gypsies in the Palace, she was very well outfitted for general use where you are frequently tied to a dock with access to plenty of 110 VAC power. However, our plans are to spend long periods of time on anchor where we have to produce all of our own power. So let me review the setup of Gypsies originally. She had 12 6-volt batteries, every two in series to create the equivalent of a 12-volt battery and the 6 resulting 12-volt pairs in parallel. This bank of 12 batteries held 1320 AMPS of 12 VDC power and is called the House Bank and is used to run the main systems on the boat. Gypsies also had 4 6-volt batteries that held 440 AMPS of 12 VDC power called the Engine Starting Bank used to start the big diesel engines and 1 battery used to start the generator’s diesel engine. The work horse is the House Bank. Gypsies has a 12.5 kilowatt generator that creates 110 VAC power but burns diesel fuel to do so. Attached to each main engine is an alternator. The port engine has a 150 AMP alternator that charges the House Bank. The starboard engine has a 120 AMP alternator that charges the Engine Starting Bank. She had a Xantrex inverter that takes 12 VDC power from the House Battery Bank and converts it to 110 VAC when we are not tied to the dock and do not have the genset running. The inverter also is used to charge the House Bank when we have 110 VAC from shore power or are running the genset. When we bought Gypsies, we thought that she was very well setup and seemed to have all of the electrical systems that we would need. When we were tied up to a dock we got all the power we need by being connected to shore power. When we were underway the big diesel engines would produce enough power to keep the House Bank charged. When we were on anchor, the generator could be started periodically to recharge the batteries. The House Bank would produce the 110 VAC power we needed when we were not connected to shore power and the genset wasn’t running.
After the first 60 days of living on the boat, it became clear that Gypsies was under-powered in several important ways. First, the inverter, which doubles as the charger for the House Bank when either the genset is on or we are connected to shore power, took too long to charge the battery bank causing us to have to run the genset about 6 to 8 hours a day to produce enough power. That is both expensive because of the diesel fuel used but also ties me to the boat for 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening. The second issue was that the alternator on the port engine was under-powered for charging the House Bank if we had started out with the bank partially discharged. It was fine to keep the batteries charged if we started out charged but not if we started with the bank run down from power usage over night. The third issue was that the 1320 AMPS in the House Battery Bank was enough for normal usage but meant that we had to recharge twice a day.
So what to do… I read lots of stuff so I began to understand the issues but not how to solve them. At this time, I was lucky enough to get some posts from the DeFever Cruisers Forum which I am a member of that dealt with this very problem. The DeFever Cruisers Forum is a group of people that post questions and answers regarding DeFever boats. Since Gypsies is a 49′ DeFever, I joined the forum and have met a bunch of people through the forum that own DeFevers. I have also learned a lot from the questions asked and the resulting answers. So the discussion that happened at about this time was about how to charge the House Battery Bank faster, one of my biggest issues. The basic answer was that you needed two inverters charging the battery bank rather than just one. The one was enough to create 110 VAC from the battery bank but not enough to charge the batteries quickly. As part of this discussion, I also met a guy named Steve Koch who owns a 49′ DeFever Raised Pilothouse named Aurora. I was introduced to him by one of the other forum members. He does mechanical and electrical work on boats. Everyone I talked to said he was great, and he certainly knows our boat since he has owned a similar boat for 13 years. I got in touch with him and, as it turned out, he and his wonderful wife Diane were only about an hour and a half by car from us and we were both stranded due to weather. So, Tammy and I rented a car and drove to where he was and met he and Diane. First, it turned out that they were two of the coolest people we have met on this journey so far and, second, Steve was unbelievably knowledgeable about all of the issues I was struggling with. We discussed my issues and he showed me how he had resolved them on Aurora. We agreed that he would do a project on Gypsies to upgrade our systems. He would swap out the one Xantrex inverter for two new Magnum inverters, wire the two engine alternators together to charge the House bank with nearly twice the power when underway, and add four more batteries to the House Bank increasing the power storage by 33% to 1760 AMPS.
As Tammy mentioned in her recent post, we spent the last week in Stuart, FL, so that I could work with Steve on Gypsies’ electrical upgrade. We got started Tuesday morning and finished up Friday afternoon. We spent a few hours on Saturday testing the system. I won’t try to describe the whole project but it was one of the most fun times I have had since purchasing Gypsies. Steve proved to be not only knowledgeable but also a great teacher. I learned an incredible amount during that 4 day period. We installed the 4 new batteries
and wired them into the system to increase the House Battery Bank from 1320 AMPS to 1760 AMPS, we ran all of the wiring needed to run the two inverters connecting them into the main wiring system,
we installed the two inverters
and put in a switch to allow me to select which one acts as the inverter
and installed two new replacement engine starting batteries. In addition, we installed two remote control devices for the inverters up on the pilothouse.
I have to tell you that I am incredibly excited about this new “electrical independence”. Since our plans for the next 2 to 3 years is to drop anchor somewhere for a week or more at a time, the ability to exist on the boat’s internal electrical system and not be tied to a dock allows us to do just that. Without this upgrade, it really was not feasible to spend more than 3 or 4 days on anchor without needing to go into a marina to “fill up” with electricity. In addition, this upgrade should save about 200 gallons of diesel fuel a month during that 2 to 3 year period.
Add comment December 22nd, 2008
Well, we are true cruisers now…we spent our first day in the Intracoastal Waterway (the ICW or the Ditch). Doug here, by the way.
Today was the coolest day I’ve ever had on the water. We spent last night at a great little marina in Portsmouth, Virginia, called the Portsmouth Boating Center. The folks that run it are great and they had the cheapest diesel we have seen yet. We paid $2.499 per gallon. A far cry from the $5.59 we paid in Block Island in late May or the $5.19 we paid to fill the tanks in Yarmouth, Maine after we cleaned the fuel tanks in June.
We got up this morning and once again found frost on the dinghy cover. We are definitely not going south fast enough. 
We left at 8:30 on the dot. The first bridge which was in only 2.6 miles didn’t open until after 8:30, then opens on request so we got to sleep in and not leave at “o-dark hundred”. Tammy and I had decided to split the helm duties today as we do many days and she was nice enough to let me have the first watch so I got to do most of the fun stuff! We only went 30 statute miles today because we had a lot of bridges and one lock to go through and didn’t want to push it too far.
Portsmouth Boating Center is less than a mile from Mile 0 of the ICW so very shortly after pulling away from the dock we were officially in the ICW. The ICW runs from Norfolk, Virginia to Miami, Florida, 1096 miles away, and is used by most cruisers who head toward the little latitudes. We may not stay in the ICW the whole way and may go outside (into the Atlantic Ocean) for some of it but the first 200 miles will definitely be inside. Actually the ICW runs most of the way from Maine to Miami but much of it is not usable by boats. The part from Norfolk to Miami is heavily used. 
Because the Ditch has land on both sides it has a lot of bridges, many of which require that they be lifted or moved in some way to allow boats to pass under.
Some are for cars and some for railways. In the first 15 miles (my watch today) we went under two bridges that were high enough for us to go under without help, two bridges that were for railways and are kept in the open position unless a train is on the way, six bridges that we had to wait for an operator to open and one lock that had to lower the water level 2 feet to account for the difference between the water depth in the Chesapeake Bay and the Albemarle Sound. One bridge required a wait of nearly 45 minutes because the railway bridge clsed well before the train got there.
The next bridge opens only once per hour and because of the earlier bridge requiring a 45 minute wait we missed the opening and had to wait another 45 minutes.
Now in a car, if you want to wait you just sit there with the brake on but in a boat you are constantly in motion. There is current and wind moving you, as well as the other boats waiting, so everyone is just moving slowly around trying not to run into each other. It is wild to watch. In the Navy we used to call it a Charlie Foxtrot…but I won’t go there. At most of the bridges there was a group of about nine boats waiting – the same nine each time – we got to know each other!
The group of nine boats consisted of sailboats, a large powerboat, a bunch of go fast powerboats and us, the lone trawler. One of the go fasts was a 51 foot Sea Ray which probably has a top speed of 40 mph. They were behind us at first and we cruise at 7.5 knots. After following us for a while they decided they needed to get in front of us so they sped by us (with about a foot to spare!), giving us a big wake to deal with. After all that, they were right in front of us in the Great Bridge Lock twenty minutes later. They were from New Jersey, go figure!
The best part of the day for me was going through the lock. Tammy and I have been through a few locks before in the Panama Canal but as a passenger (hmmm – maybe there next???). This was my first one as captain. It was too cool for words! After milling about for ten minutes waiting for the lock to open, we were the third boat into the lock and docked against the starboard wall.
When you dock against the wall, you use just one bow line and one stern line. The line is looped around a cleat on the side of the wall and then held by one of the people on the boat. John and Colleen were our able line handlers.
After all the boats were in (about 12 of them), the back gate was closed and the water level was lowered two feet. Then the front gate opened and we all poured out of the lock. The lock master asked us to hurry because he had a tug and a barge that needed to use the lock. Commercial boats usually get priority in a lock so we were lucky to get through ahead of the tug. That same tug and barge passed where we were anchored about two and a half hours later. Boy is he slow!
After all my fun at the wheel, I turned it over to Tammy, the co-captain, at about 1:00. That four and a half hours at the wheel was great fun. Just driving Gypsies in the Bay or outside in the ocean when there are no other boats around is fun but having all that activity was simply exhilarating. The boat kitties seemed to miss the excitement of the moment. They slept right through the whole day.
I actually felt bad because I had all the fun but our friendly (???) go fasts decided to make Tammy’s watch memorable. Shortly after taking the con she was steaming through the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal and four of the go fasts decided they needed to pass us in order to get to the next bridge on time for the opening. The first three slowed down to a speed just faster than us and passed with as much room as possible between us and them. We got wake but nothing serious.
The last one was the New Jersey goomba I mentioned earlier. He got just even with us and gunned his engine. It threw a wake at us that rivals anything we have seen before. The furniture in the salon was thrown across the room in addition to other miscellaneous stuff. I got on the radio and suggested that trying to swamp boats in the ICW was not proper maritime etiquette and that the next time he passed a boat he not accelerate until he was completely passed. He actually apologized but said he “had to accelerate” because he was running out of good water – duh, that would make you run aground quicker! We were not amused.
With little additional excitement we arrived at Blackwater Creek where we intended to anchor. Tammy did her normal masterful job locating the right spot to drop anchor and I proceeded to do just that. The spot Tammy chose is a perfectly wonderful, scenic spot about 200 yards off the ICW so we can get a quick takeoff tomorrow.
I think I can get used to this life!
Add comment October 31st, 2008
Doug here…
If you have been paying attention to the blog, you may remember Tammy mentioning that we were in Haven Harbour Marina in Rock Hall, Maryland, to have our watermaker installed. Now, many of you may be up to speed on what a watermaker is but I’ll bet very few of you know how it makes water. I thought I’d write a short blog entry about the watermaker and the excitement that came along with the installation.
First, we decided to buy a watermaker from a reputable company rather than buying the parts and assembling it ourselves. A lot of cruisers, to save money, do the later, but I didn’t think my mechanical skills were quite up to the task. We purchased the Newport 400 by Spectra Watermakers. In a nutshell, this takes salt water from the ocean, filters it three times, runs it through a reverse osmosis process (more on that later) and voila… distilled water. The Newport 400 uses a Clark pump, which is very quiet, and makes 16.5 gallons of nice pure water per hour using only about 26 Amps of DC power.
The first step in the process of making the water is to use a lift pump to pull the water from the ocean through a thru-hull fitting and a strainer. It then pulls the water through a 20 micron filter and then a 5 micron filter to clean it as much as possible.
The cleaner the sea water the longer the filters last. In the Chesapeake Bay, they don’t last very long. In the islands they should last for about a month of making about 50 to 60 gallons a day.
After the water is pre-filtered with the 20 micron and the 5 micron filters, it passes into the Clark Pump where it goes through a reverse osmosis process to desalinate the water.
Watermakers don’t actually MAKE water, they DESALINATE water. Now how does it work? The underlying technology is pretty cool. If you put non-salty water in a container on one side of a membrane and salty water on the other side of the membrane, the non-salty water will osmose through the membrane until the pressure on each side is equal. With normal osmosis, the water moves to the salty side of the membrane until equilibrium is achieved. If you apply pressure to the salt solution side equal to the osmotic pressure you can create equilibrium without the water moving. If you add additional pressure you can actually force the pure water to flow from the salty side to the non-salty side. This process is called reverse osmosis. So basically, the clark pump puts pressure on the salt water to make the pure water reverse osmose to the other side of the membrane, thereby “making water” and leaving salty brine behind to be flushed overboard. The osmotic pressure of seawater is approximately 460 PSI. The Clark Pump produces pressure between 800 and 1100 PSI, depending on the temperature of the sea water. Colder water requires more pressure.
The folks at Haven Harbour Marina ordered the watermaker for us and we docked at the marina for a couple days to have it installed. Installing it entailed mounting it on the wall in the lazzarette and running power and water hoses through the wall into the engine room. We already had a thru-hull in place in the engine room to get the water from the ocean. They had to cut a small thru-hull just above the waterline in the lazzarette for the salty brine to be flushed from. In addition to setting up the water maker and getting electricity to it, they had to run a very small hose from the watermaker in the lazz, at the stern of the boat, forward to the water tank which is under the sole in the master stateroom about forty feet away. All of this took about two days and they were ready to go. Then Murphy took over the installation. You know… Murphy’s Law.
When they tested the unit, the probe that tests the salinity in the water after it has been desalinated was faulty so the unit kept rejecting the water it was making. The manufacturer in California had to over night another one out to the marina. That arrived late in the day the next day and was successfully installed. Once the unit was successfully pressurized, it began to leak. After testing all of the fittings they had put in, the team realized that the leak was coming from inside the watermaker itself. Once it was opened, it was determined that the people at the factory had tightened one of the connections into the manifold too tight and had cracked the plastic manifold. So the team got back on the phone with the manufacturer and had a replacement manifold mailed out for over night delivery. Late the next day, Friday, the manifold was installed and the system was fully operational.
This system is the coolest thing. You push a button, either on the front of the unit in the lazzarette or on the remote panel installed in the pilothouse and the system starts making water. You tell it how long to run and it runs for that long, shuts itself off and back flushes itself with fresh water to keep it fresh until the next time you use it. It is so easy and so far has worked flawlessly.
The team at Haven Harbour were great, as always, and did a fantastic job. Neither of the problems were of their making and they got them fixed within 24 hours… each. They kept their spirits up and did not get too frustrated. The two main guys, Randy and Mike, were on the boat, often curled up like little pretzels, due to space constraints, for the better part of four days.
Now we can make water in the islands to replace the small amount we use each day. Water in the islands is very expensive and often not very good quality. This Spectra watermaker makes water that does not even have the hint of salty taste to it. In fact, the water has absolutely no taste at all. It is essentially distilled water. There is a little release valve and hose on the side and you can direct the water flow to it to taste the water before it gets mixed in the big tank. It is totally tasteless. I know because I tasted it!
Add comment October 20th, 2008
I recently did a blog entry that described all of the cool maintenance that I had done to Gypsies. Well, it appears that I did not tighten everything quite enough. We left Kennebunkport about 10:00 AM on Saturday, August 30, and about 5 minutes out of the harbor a very loud piercing alarm sounded. It took about 30 seconds to realize it was the dreaded high temp alarm on the port engine. Now high temp alarms can be caused by a number of things, but none of them are good!
We quickly shut down the port engine and I disappeared into the engine room. Tammy remembered to also shut off the synchronizers since with one engine we didn’t need to keep the engines in sync. Upon arriving in the engine room it was clear what the problem was. Since the bilge was full of coolant and the walls were covered by coolant and one little pipe was still leaking coolant, I came to the conclusion that we had a coolant leak. Pretty cool deductive reasoning, huh!
Since we had stocked spares for coastal cruising, I did not have enough coolant on board to fill one engine. So, rather than return to Kennebunkport, we decided to complete the trip to Wentworth by the Sea on the starboard engine. We kept the engine at the same rpm as we normally do and we were able to make about 6.5 knots instead of the 8 knots we normally cruise at. It took us about an hour longer to get to Wentworth than it would have on both engines.
Since we had not run on one engine before, I kept going down to the engine room to be sure everything was going fine. The only issue we had was the coupler where the shaft meets the shaft seals ran about 75 degrees hotter on the port engine since it was turning but was not getting water to cool it. Seemed like it was not a big deal so we kept going. The other minor issue was that the stabilizer system gets its hydraulic power from the port engine so we had no stabilizers. The seas were luckily pretty calm so it wasn’t a big issue.
Upon arrival in Wentworth, I tried to contact the local John Deere dealer to get some John Deere Cool-Gard to fill the engine. They, of course, were closed until Tuesday because of the holiday weekend. No problem, we were going to stay in Wentworth until Tuesday anyway. We got the coolant this morning by delivery from Manchester by Kathy, Colleen’s sister, and Colleen’s Mom. We were underway by noon and Gypsies ran perfectly!
Add comment September 2nd, 2008
As Tammy mentioned in a recent post, we were sitting at the Royal River Boatyard preparing to get the bottom painted. During this stay in the Royal River, I planned to get a lot of maintenance done to Gypsies. With the help of a fabulous computer software program by SeaKits called the Marine Maintenance System (MMS), I have been putting together an exhaustive maintenance schedule for Gypsies. This schedule has about 75 or 80 maintenance items across all the ships systems. I have done about half of them but still have a long list of ones that exceed my current technical competence. Alan Dugas, who owns and runs the Royal River Boatyard, agreed to let me have one of his top mechanics, Ryan, to help with the maintenance.
My plan was to do basically every piece of maintenance needed on the boat before we leave. This does two things; one, it gets Gypsies ready for the trip and two, makes sure that I can do all of the maintenance in the future. This has been, and continues to be, a mammoth undertaking but one that has been a lot of fun. This boat that we have is an incredible piece of machinery that was well cared for by its former owner but was not used much in the last year that they owned it or the first six months that we owned it. The maintenance has been a great way to be sure that all of the systems are operational. We have had to replace a few things but not much.
So, beginning on Wednesday, August 6, Ryan and I began the maintenance process. Ryan’s mission was to teach me how to do the rest of the maintenance items (he drew the short straw!). We spent 7 working days on this process, working on the John Deere engines, the Westerbeke generator, the Wesmar bow thruster, the Maxwell windlass, the Naiad stabilizers, the ZF transmissions, the Hynautic engine controls, the Capilano steering and even the shafts. We removed and cleaned heat exchangers, flushed the fresh water cooling systems, replaced raw water impellers, removed rocker arm covers to test valve clearances, and more on the engines and the genset. We replaced all the underwater zincs and even replaced the seals in the bow thruster and the shaft seals on the main shafts. We drained and replaced the gear oil in the windlass and bow thruster. In short, we did just about everything that could ever need to be done to the major ships systems.
Working with Ryan was one of the coolest things I have ever done. I learned a lot and found out that I really enjoy doing this kind of work. Ryan was fantastic! He is not only incredibly knowledgeable but is great at explaining things so that an amateur like me can understand. Ryan is an engineering officer in the Merchant Marine on a break between postings so is very well qualified to do way more than I asked of him. His pleasant disposition and eagerness to help me made the task all the more fun.
Gypsies in the Palace is now ready for her journey. Now that she knows that she is loved and well cared for, she will do us right!
Add comment August 20th, 2008
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