Our Day in Fulton - Changing Props and a Chinese Dinner Out!

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 85 - June 24, 2017

We will probably be staying at Canal Landing Marina in Fulton for only one more night, since it is now looking like Monday rather than Tuesday is the day to cross Lake Ontario. Tomorrow we can move up the Oswego Canal to the wall between Locks O-7 and O-8 so we will be well positioned to start across the big lake!

We have been receiving a lot of advice on C-Brats about our inability to get Daydream on the plane - crossing Oneida Lake, the best we could do was 15.5 statute miles per hour at 4200 RPM at WOT (wide open throttle), so we knew were were lugging the engine, which is not good! The range for WOT according to the BF150 manual is 5000 - 6000 RPMs. So it is evident we are over-propped for the weight of the boat, and we are loaded for bear!

The prop we have been using is a Quicksilver aluminum prop, 15.5" diameter and 15 pitch, which works great at sea level at our usual Pacific Northwest cruising weight. Our spare prop is the original Honda stainless 14.5" diameter by 15 pitch, which is probably still over-propped but going in the right direction, so I decided to change props today.

Pat changing props
from the Sea Eagle

Ordinarily, changing props is not a difficult proposition, but the Honda prop is buried deep under a hatch in the cockpit floor, so the first order of business was moving just about everything out of the cockpit and taking up enough of our nifty cockpit floor covering to access the hatch. Then I needed a platform to work from where I would not lose anything in the water, so I raised the outboard, fastened the Sea Eagle in place under it, and then lowered the outboard so the prop was directly over the center of the kayak.  

Quicksilver prop with chunk out of blade

The hardest part was, as it always seems to be, getting the cotter pin out of the shaft. Once that was done, it was an easy job of removing the Quicksilver prop. We were both shocked to see that there was a HUGE chunk missing from one of the blades of the Quicksilver prop. This probably occurred while polishing a rock, possibly as far back as Florida, but we have no way to know. What we know for sure is that the missing chunk could not have been doing anything good for performance! It remains to be seen what improvement, if any, we get from changing props, but we are hoping for the best!

We have been mostly cooking our suppers on the boat, but we decided to go out for dinner, since we needed to go up to Fulton for some shopping at Rite Aid and mailing some stuff at the Post Office. We went to a Chinese restaurant called Dragon City, which had tables but was mostly take-out! We enjoyed our meal there, and came home with some left-over hot and sour soup (which was neither very hot nor very sour, but we will fix that!), and a good part of Patty's General Tao's Chicken.  I, naturally, managed to pretty much polish off the Mongolian Beef!

After we got back,Patty read for a while, and  I shaved, showered, and had an early bed time!