OK, this has been an interesting weekend so far. Friday, mid-afternoon we stopped working for the day. The drizzle which had started in the early morning and the cold temperatures were enough to send John, Ryder, David and I home. While John and Ryder were presumably off to their various and enjoyable non-Mahdee weekend activities…Saturday, David and I went to the boatyard planning to do some more cotton caulking of Mahdee. We’ve got at least two man-weeks of cotton caulking left to do, so this was a good idea.

Ah, as good ideas go, this one almost immediately went by the wayside. The weather was cold and drizzly. After we’d stopped and talked to one of the other folks hanging out in the boatyard for a quarter-hour, we opened up the shop, prepared to start caulking, and then…it started raining. David and I looked at each other and said “lets go to Minney’s. And that’s all it took to get us to drive up to Costa Mesa (100 miles up the California coast) to meander through the tight isles of this well-known used boat-parts shop. Meander, yes, we did. We didn’t buy anything but we did come to a startling discovery and conclusion about Mahdee’s intended exhaust system: We need to think about changing the design from what it had been since 1937–a North Sea exhaust–to something more contemporary that exits the boat via the transom.

We came to this decision when squeezing by the engine driven crash pumps and raw water filters at the store we saw two 3.5″ Groco seacocks. Brand new, what a find! While Mahdee’s simple and effective North Sea Exhaust didn’t originally have seacocks, the new codes for boats require a seacock on any thru-hull that will be underwater when the boat is heeled. After looking over these huge and heavy seacocks and realizing that the 4″ ones Mahdee would need would be even more huge and heavy mounted on the hull…not to mention in the way of one of Mahdee’s berths (OUR berth, that is!), we realized that we needed to go back to the drawing board on Mahdee’s exhaust system and see if we couldn’t figure out a better plan than that which Mahdee’s owner had installed in 1937 when she was converted from forward engine room and electric drive to a diesel mounted under the charthouse.

So, rather than seeing us working steadily away on that cotton caulking project, Sunday found David and I hanging out inside Mahdee–first admiring our handi-work and patting ourselves on the back that she hadn’t leaked during the rains of Friday night and Saturday–then crawling around under the charthouse and cockpit trying to figure out how to squeeze in the two waterlift/waterlock mufflers as well as perhaps an exhaust gas/water separator for the genset; further, calculating yet again the rise, run, and drop requirements for the main engine exhaust to exit the boat at the transom. We did finally decide that if we were willing to have a dry section of exhaust run for about 3′ which included a 18” rise from the engine manifold, we could find a way to get the engine exhaust out the transom.

Today, in theory, David and I are headed over to Mahdee to do a little cotton caulking…lets see if we make it this time.