All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go...

Well, let me see. I spent 4 hours Monday decorating the boat for the Christmas Boat Parade, 3 on Tuesday, 4 on Wednesday, then another three on Thursday as we were putting the finishing touches on. The parade is tonight and tomorrow night and I’m sitting here in my living room watching the boats go by and crying in my drink.

As you may recall, in September we had a runaway starter motor on the stbd engine. My mechanic was knee deep in getting boats out of the water and getting them winterized so I told Jim to not worry about my problem and take care of it when he had time. I told him I just wanted to be sure we would be all fixed so we could go in the boat parade.

We took off for AZ and I kept in touch with him while we were gone. He got the starter rebuilt and installed on the boat. He turned on the starter switches and it turned over just great so he shut it off and called it good.

We went down to the boat on Monday to start decorating and also to drive it over to the fuel dock to fill up on diesel. Neither engine would start. The generator would not start. We had no 24V power at all.

I panicked and called him and found he was up elk hunting. Two of his guys came down and spent several hours trying to figure out what happened and they discovered that the batteries in the starter circuits were deader than a doornail. Boiled dry. So they checked the 24V starter and it was fried.

Jim had told me I should replace it because it was 20 years old, old technology, and it could crap out at any time. Well we all know how Murphy’s Law works. It crapped out at the worst possible time. Fortunately Jim had ordered a new ProMariner 24Volt, 30 Amp, 3 circuit charger and it was sitting on his desk. The two workers were going to install it on Tuesday and would have it up and running on Wednesday, which was the day Jim was to return to work from his hunting trip.

Jim replaced the batteries, still nothing to make the stbd engine start. The port engine was fine. He started checking wiring diagrams and found that there is a wire harness that connects at the engine and goes to a “Y” where it splits to go to both helms to feed them signals for the instruments. There were some fried wires in the end of the harness at the engine. Damn. He checked the upper helm and all of the wiring going to the stbd gauges was fried. The lower helm gauges and wiring seemed to be OK.

So this morning we called the insurance company and gave them the bad news. They opened a claim and I’m now waiting for word from an adjuster. So the boat is all decorated and I’ll take some photos tomorrow night with the lights on.

I’m bummed but, if there’s a silver lining to the cloud it’s that we’re headed back down to AZ at the end of the month and he’ll have about 3 months to get it all fixed and ops checked.

Now that is bad luck. I though I had a monopoly on that sort of luck, but it seems not. My commiserations...

Sorry to hear about the electrical issues. Hope they all get resolved!

Peter-since we all onw boats, none of us can claim a monopoly on misery! The best we can do is to come here and share in it!

Ok, well this is a good example of my sort of luck..? I was renting the slip in my marina initially, and they were selling with 30 yr leases for $32k, at the time. Then they started going up, so at $38k I bought mine with 27 yrs left on the lease. They then rose steadily so by about 2008 they were selling for $120k plus. I thought I had lucked into the best investment ever. Then came the GFC etc, and that, added to the opening of some more marinas in the area, and the prices started heading down. Now boats and births are just not moving, and my slip neighbour, who up to now was still renting, tells me today he bought one nearby for $20k, with 17 yrs left on the lease..!

I have learned in my short big boating time NOT to say " I have time fix it when you can". You will always miss something you want to do with your boat are when they start repairing they will be something else wrong and take twice as long to repair and you will miss something else. I now always need it now and if they can not do it soon, I always say OK I will look for someone else and call you back. They will almost all the time work you in sooner than they said they would.

GFC said:

Well, let me see. I spent 4 hours Monday decorating the boat for the Christmas Boat Parade, 3 on Tuesday, 4 on Wednesday, then another three on Thursday as we were putting the finishing touches on. The parade is tonight and tomorrow night and I’m sitting here in my living room watching the boats go by and crying in my drink.

As you may recall, in September we had a runaway starter motor on the stbd engine. My mechanic was knee deep in getting boats out of the water and getting them winterized so I told Jim to not worry about my problem and take care of it when he had time. I told him I just wanted to be sure we would be all fixed so we could go in the boat parade.

We took off for AZ and I kept in touch with him while we were gone. He got the starter rebuilt and installed on the boat. He turned on the starter switches and it turned over just great so he shut it off and called it good.

We went down to the boat on Monday to start decorating and also to drive it over to the fuel dock to fill up on diesel. Neither engine would start. The generator would not start. We had no 24V power at all.

I panicked and called him and found he was up elk hunting. Two of his guys came down and spent several hours trying to figure out what happened and they discovered that the batteries in the starter circuits were deader than a doornail. Boiled dry. So they checked the 24V starter and it was fried.

Jim had told me I should replace it because it was 20 years old, old technology, and it could crap out at any time. Well we all know how Murphy’s Law works. It crapped out at the worst possible time. Fortunately Jim had ordered a new ProMariner 24Volt, 30 Amp, 3 circuit charger and it was sitting on his desk. The two workers were going to install it on Tuesday and would have it up and running on Wednesday, which was the day Jim was to return to work from his hunting trip.

Jim replaced the batteries, still nothing to make the stbd engine start. The port engine was fine. He started checking wiring diagrams and found that there is a wire harness that connects at the engine and goes to a “Y” where it splits to go to both helms to feed them signals for the instruments. There were some fried wires in the end of the harness at the engine. Damn. He checked the upper helm and all of the wiring going to the stbd gauges was fried. The lower helm gauges and wiring seemed to be OK.

So this morning we called the insurance company and gave them the bad news. They opened a claim and I’m now waiting for word from an adjuster. So the boat is all decorated and I’ll take some photos tomorrow night with the lights on.

I’m bummed but, if there’s a silver lining to the cloud it’s that we’re headed back down to AZ at the end of the month and he’ll have about 3 months to get it all fixed and ops checked.

Click to expand...

In Ireland we've got a saying to cover these types of situations:

Maybe it's all for luck!


Imagine you were 50 miles offshore when the batteries went dead ... ...

So sorry for the troubles. Sounds like you may be lucky all those burnt wires didn't start a fire?

Yeah, all of those bad scenarios could have happened and we're lucky they didn't. Another one that could have happened that didn't was that all of our bilge pumps run off 24V. When all of this sh!t it the fan and the 24V system shut down, that killed the bilge pumps ability to pump.


Fortunately we have a very non-leaky boat and I had shut all of the sea cocks so we had almost no intake of water in the bilge. What started me checking on all of this mess was that I went down into the engine room to open sea cocks and found about 4"-5" of water in the main engine room bilge area. It's small (about 2' wide x 3' long) so there was not a lot of gallons of water, just much more than the usual 2" sitting in there.


I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn't closed the sea cocks, then we lost shore power which would have shut off the heaters which could have caused the boat to freeze up (we had a few days in the 20's) which could...... You get my point, I'm sure.


Well, Mr Murphy struck, but thank God he didn't strike as hard as he might have.

Here’s the star of the show. I borrowed him from a neighbor who has used The Grinch as an outdoor decoration for the past couple of years.

Needless to say, we got a few strange looks as we drove from home to the marina.


Here he is, partially installed. The Grinch’s mountain is made from pallets we cut to size for him. His body is held up by being wired to a piece of 1/2 “ galvanized pipe that’s mounted to a flange that’s attached to a piece of plywood that’s screwed down to the pallet on the bottom. His arms are held up by being wired to pieces of ¾” Schedule 40 PVC.

He’s not very flexible so we pretty much had to build a platform that would hold him in the position he’s in. Here he is with the platform finished.

The lights on the sides of the boat and his “mountain” came from Walmart. They’re 4’x4’ blanket LED lights. Last year I was in our local Wally World after Christmas. They had all of their lights at 75% off. They had 60 of those blanket lights so I asked the dept head what she would sell them to me if I bought all 60. She said “a quarter a box” so I bought all 60 for $15.

Here’s the main man all lit up.




So that’s what Beachcomber would have looked like has we been able to participate in the parade. SNIFF, SNIFF. Maybe next year.