Take Five Maintenance Weekend

While Natalie and the kids were busy in Sheboygan with Boot Camp and the Gus Macker basketball tournament, I found myself spending this weekend in Sturgeon Bay working on a variety of maintenance items for Take Five. We recently lost our bimini top to a storm, but luckily it was an easy repair and it’s already back on the boat and ready to be reinstalled. I’ll need to wait until I have another adult on board to put it all back up, but I’m thankful it wasn’t in need of complete replacement as the only tears were along the stitching seams and not of the fabric itself. I am contemplating a hard top installation in the future, but I think something like that will be very costly to fabricate.

I met with the canvas and upholstery contractor on Saturday when he returned the bimini top and we discussed the replacement of the seat cushions. They are 36 years old and have definitely seen better days. Even though they have been covered for the majority of their lives, the combination of time, sun, and water have made them very brittle. The galley dinette seats are also torn and are currently being held together with white duct tape which makes the upholstery upgrade all the more necessary. After measurements were taken, the next step will be for Natalie and me to meet in the shop and look at some samples so we can pick out the exact style we would like. That probably won’t happen until September, but we weren’t planning on completing this project until the beginning of the next boating season anyway.

I also needed to replace the broken hailer on the front of the boat. The hailer/foghorn/PA speaker is a loud horn, usually mounted outside the cabin or on the mast, and is used to hail other boats. I’ve also used it numerous times when stuck out on Lake Michigan in thick fog and needed other boats to know my location.

One of my biggest concerns was that I have noticed the starboard engine clutch control arm has been very difficult to move and the hydraulic reservoir kept losing pressure. It’s supposed to be maintained at 80 psi but would often drop during cruising and I would have to repressurize it while underway. I initially thought there was an air leak around the reservoir as I wasn’t noticing any fluid leaks, but this weekend I was able to find the problem. It’s a large leak located on the Hynautic transmission slave which connects to the clutch of the engines.

I found the replacement part and the rebuild kit online, but I’m not sure I have the time or expertise to actually fix this on my own. I think I would give it a try if I had the time, but since I don’t live close enough to the boat and I’m just too busy with my career, I think I will leave this in the hands of the experts. Hopefully, this will be completed within the next month as we are hoping to get back to Door County for a few more weekend getaways before cold weather arrives.

On Sunday and on my way back home, I decided to stop by Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding down the road from our marina and check out the newly arrived Arthur M Anderson. SS Arthur M. Anderson is a cargo ship of the laker type. She is famous for being the last ship to be in contact with SS Edmund Fitzgerald before Edmund Fitzgerald sank on 10 November 1975. Arthur M. Anderson was also the first rescue ship on the scene in a vain search for Edmund Fitzgerald survivors. The vessel’s namesake, Arthur Marvin Anderson, was director of U.S. Steel, a member of its finance committee and vice chairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. at the time. The ship was launched in 1952 and is in active service. The ship was having problems with its loader and it’s planned to be in Sturgeon Bay for only 7-10 days before it heads back out for service. To put this in perspective, the Anderson is 767 feet long and 70 feet wide! I couldn’t get much closer as a storm was rolling in at the time and the winds were strong. I was afraid the drone would get away from me as it was sending alarms the entire time I had it in the air. The Roger Blough, in the background, recently (in February of this year) endured a devastating fire while docked and I think it may no longer be able to be put back into service. It too was one of the vessels that helped conduct a search for survivors of the Edmund Fitzgerald back in 1975.