Thanksgiving Evening - time to start moving again

We are still at The Wharf Marina in Orange Beach, Alabama, a safe place to be over the Thanksgiving holiday week. Since we arrived Sunday, November 21, we have gotten a few items accomplished. 

We did an acid wash on the raw water cooling systems on both boat engines. Do you know what that is?  I’m guessing my twin brothers know, as they both work on engines.  But if you don’t know, I learned and I’m here to enlighten you so you can be the envy of your friends at parties!

Acid washing an engine cooling system is something done to a heat exchanger to remove the scale (raw water mineral build-up) and slime. The port engine on Taurus’s temperature gauge has been showing that the engine is running hot. 😳   Fred contacted his Volvo engine expert in Connecticut for advice as to what the issue could be. There are a few choices: the engine really is running hot, the port engine temperature sensor is not working correctly, or the port engine gauge is not working correctly. We did the acid wash on the advice of our expert, in case it really is running hot. We have been cruising and sitting in fresh water since July 1, 2021, once we got partway up the Hudson River.  Apparently fresh water can cause slime 😑 and scale in the cooling system. Who knew?!

So I got on Instacart and ordered 10 gallons of white vinegar to use as our acid, again, under the virtual supervision of our Diesel engine expert. The first question when my Instacart shopper started shopping was, “Do you really want 10 gallons of white vinegar?" 😂.  I assured him I did, as we needed five gallons per engine.  

After letting the vinegar sit in the engine overnight, we anxiously watched to see if anything obvious came out of the wet exhaust.  Nothing obvious came out of either engine, but hopefully we got rid of any scale or slime from the fresh water.  We are now back in salt water, as we entered the Bay of Mobile, and the Gulf of Mexico last Sunday.  If the gauge still shows hot, we have an infrared thermometer to get an actual reading of the port engine temperature and compare that to the starboard engine temperature.  More on that later.  

For now, it’s time to get going again.  We are heading to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida tomorrow and then to Panama City, Florida on the next day, Saturday.  There, we will pick up Dave, Fred’s college roommate and good friend, to go on the Gulf crossing with us.  Since it’ll be a 12 hour crossing, we can use all the hands on deck that we can get.  I know that some of you are asking, “Why don’t they just take the intracoastal waterway?”  The answer is that it’s not deep enough. We have a four and a half foot draft (height of waterline of boat down to lowest part of boat (in our case, our propellers) and the waterway is less than five feet deep. We plan to go to Carrabelle, Florida, and then wait for a good weather window.  Hopefully, Neptune will be kind to us if we pick the right weather day.

This map gives a good view of what we plan to do.

Neptune (God of the Seas)

And here’s our sunset last night