Daydream Gets Serviced at Irish Boat Shop and a Postscript for Ontario!

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

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 126 - August 4, 2017

We picked Irish Boat Shop in Harbor Springs because of its sterling reviews for service on Active Captain. They were not wrong, and we will add our own favorable review!

As we were finishing up breakfast, John, one of the service honchos, came down and told us they would be ready for us at the little TraveLift in about half an hour. AJ, our mechanic, came down a bit later and said he would ride the bow to help us get into the sling at the TraveLift. If I had not mentioned it before, it is WINDY here, which makes handling a flat bottom boat in close quarters a bit tricky, but I did manage to get out of our slip, into the next fairway over and onto the slings in the TraveLift, without bouncing off anything! Mike, the operator, helped me get off, and just like that, Daydream was up in the air! While it was on the lif, Baxter was still on the boat. He came out onto the swim step and lept four feet to the ground to be free! He went for a little walkabout, and the ladies in the office where Patty was waiting during the service gave him treats!

Daydream in the TraveLift

This service, the 400 hour interval service (which we are doing at 476 hours), is different from the standard 100 hour service (which we do at 150-200 hours). l can now do the 100 hour service, assuming I can get the boat out of the water, since it only involves oil change,, oil filter change, external Racor water-fuel separator cartidge change and lower unit lube. This one is more difficult and more critical, because there are two filters under the cowling that need to be changed. One is merely difficult to access, while the other one is next to impossible! Thank you, Honda!

AJ first did the oil change, oil filter change and lower unit lube. Being the mechanic that he is, he had little difficulty with the first filter, which is on a bracket with the infamous water-in-fuel sensor which was the subject of an old blog post I wrote in 2009, Life without Touch. Please take a detour and read this post! It is a little long, and only partly about the Honda BF150, but you will get a bit more insight into my struggles with all things mechancal!  I mistakenly called the do-hinky an oil-water separator in the old blog post, but in reality it is a sensor for water in the fuel that might get by the main Racor fuel-water separator. AJ also did not have a problem with the wire attached to the water sensor because he disconnected it from the other end, and removed the whole bracket with the fuel filter and the water sensor! Bingo, first internal filter was replaced.

The second internal filter presented a little more of a problem. AJ checked his phone for the service diagram and realized the second filter was way down deep, no way to reach that spot without removing the chaps. What, you say? What are chaps on an outboard motor? I had never heard of chaps on an outboard either. Well, they are the outer coverings of the outboard below the engine cowling and above the lower unit.  In five minutes, AJ had the chap off on the side where the stupid little filter lives.

Naked Honda BF150 without cowling or chaps

AJ then soon had the old filter removed and replaced, and the chap reinstalled. The new filter was a light green color. Based on the appearance of the filter AJ removed, it had been in there a long, long time!

Dirty filter! New one is light green, this was nearly black!

He next changed the external Racor fuel-water separator. The final thing was changing our wounded three blade Honda SS prop for a brand new Michigan Wheel three blade SS prop with basically the same diameter and pitch. The old Honda prop will be an emergency-only spare for the rest of our Loop and then will get repaired when we get back home.

New Michigan Wheel three blade SS prop!

I managed to get Daydream back in the slip with Patty catching the bow rail and AJ handling the stern line. Baxter was on the boat, and was SO anxious to get off that he took a flying leap as we were approaching the dock and missed! He was swimming between the boat and the dock, and fortunately Mike, the lift operator, was at our slip to help and pulled Baxter out. He took off like a rocket up the dock and I think Baxter didn't anything to do with us for a while!

The service and prop were not cheap, but we are SO relieved that the critical service has been performed and we have a new prop. We will REALLY try to stay away from rocks, which should be a lot easier now that we are out of Georgian Bay!

Now another little side trip! Remember my incredulity that canned corned beef hash and ground pork breakfast sausage was nowhere to be found in Canada, or at least in Ontario? For my Canadian friends, here is what they look like, courtesy of our shopping trip at the IGA in Harbor Springs after the engine service! The IGA is a little less than a mile, much of it up a fairly steep hill, and we were not looking forward to the walk back. When the checker found out we had walked up from the marina, she called somebody to drive us back down. Good service at the Harbor Springs IGA!

Dear Ontario: this is one thing that apparently does not EXIST in your fine province!

And here is the other thing!

And a post-script! Today this blog exceeded 30,000 page views, which just blows me away! Who are you? How did you find our blog? We'd love to hear from you, please post a comment if you would care to share!