Murphy's law is that whatever can go wrong, will. If old Murph had been a cruiser, he would have added, "all at the same time." It's not that our boats are conspiring against us, it's just that one problem generally leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to, usually, a big mess.
In our case the big mess was precipitated by the rolly trip between the Vivorillos and Guanaja, but contributing factors were the old pickling solution we used for storing our watermaker, and the jury-rig repair we made to our refrigerator back in September. The old pickling solution was discovered by Spectra, our watermaker manufacturer, to damage the rubber seals in the equipment, and although they announced free replacement for new solution, we were not able to get it until after we had stored the watermaker for our month-long trip back to the US. (The recommendation was to not use it for over two months, so we thought we might be ok. But we had also pickled the watermaker with that same older solution for the entire summer the year before.) We've been springing small leaks since we returned, and lately they've gotten bigger. Also when we returned from that trip, we discovered the refrigerator wouldn't start, victim of slow corrosion that destroyed a cable and its connector. Britt cobbled together a replacement from a household electrical box and some spare heavy-gauge wire, but the new pieces wouldn't fit inside the manufacturer-supplied junction box. So we just left the box open -- after all, it was a temporary fix, right? But the "temporary fix" turned more or less permanent, because it worked, and when something is working we are disinclined to mess with it, especially when tracking down parts and ripping things apart is a hassle. So when we ran the watermaker during our long motorsailing stint, and the leaks got bigger, they leaked brine right into the open fridge electrical junction box.
Amazingly, the fridge continued working until we got to Guanaja. Then we noticed it was turning on and immediately turning itself off. We got into the guts to see what was wrong, and discovered the mass of corrosion inside the box. Even before we made the jury-rigged fix, the junction box hadn't been optimal -- Glacier Bay, the manufacturer, had used screw-down receptacles and non-tinned wire rather than the lug-type connectors and tinned wire that are standard for marine use. The wire receptacles were also designed for smaller gauge wire than we felt it prudent to run, which contributed to the September problem because we ran larger cables almost to the junction box and then used external connectors to step down to the size that would fit in the receptacles. In addition, we'd added another control to the fridge, a switch to turn on the fridge water pump independent of the rest of the system, which we used for re-priming the pump after draining the system to change and clean filters, and we wanted to move that switch closer to the rest of the fridge controls. Finally, we had erred in placing the control box in a less-accessible and more-susceptible-to-getting-wet spot than it probably should have been. The solution was to make a whole new junction box, the way it should have been done in the first place, and put it where we should have put it in the first place.
Of course, figuring out how to duplicate the junction box from the wiring diagrams, and then making something, would take a while. Our immediate problem was how to run the fridge to keep our stuff cold. Britt, as usual, came up with a brilliant idea: he'd bypass all the existing wiring and just apply direct power to the water pump, the compressor, and the coolant valve -- kind of like hot-wiring a car. This would mean that we would need to manually turn the power on and off, and since the built-in cold plate thermostat was part of what was being bypassed, we needed another way of sensing the temperature. That was my brilliant contribution, to tape the little Radio Shack temperature probe, which we used for sensing the fridge box temperature, directly to the cold plate. (The type of fridge we have uses seawater to cool a freon-type coolant, which circulates to the refrigerator's cold plate, which is a big metal box filled with a chemical which freezes solid at 26 degrees. It's like "super-ice". As the fridge slowly warms, the cold plate chemical eventually melts, and the cold plate temperature rises, which triggers the compressor to begin the cycle again.)
So we ran the fridge manually for a day or so, while Britt figured out the wiring and designed and built a new junction and control box. (You can see our new wiring diagram here. Wiring diagrams for other parts of our electrical system are on our systems page in the boat information area of this website.) Then it was time to rip everything out and rebuild...and cross our fingers as we hit the switches for the first time! Nothing blew up, nothing shorted, so it looks like we've got a happy fridge once again.
Of course, that was only half of the problem. Next came the watermaker leaks. The one that had been directly over the old junction box was easy to tighten up, but the older leak on the other end of the membrane turned out to be a crack in the membrane housing at the high-pressure seawater inlet. That's not so easy to fix; Britt daubed some goo on the cracked threads and is hoping this will penetrate enough to seal things up. We may have to appeal to Spectra for a new membrane housing when we get back to the US. (Spectra is one of the best companies out there to deal with, excellent customer service, and we have no doubt that they will help us out.)
So with all the links in the chain reaction cleaned up (including the clean-up of the icky watery mess in the bottom of the watermaker locker), we are ready to get back to our usual hiking, snorkeling, and lounging. At least until Murphy strikes again.
