The TyBoo floats! We took off yesterday morning and headed up the river to Cathlamet, where we stayed overnight. Kay really likes the new boaterhome.
Everything worked pretty good, after some initial mishaps. First off, about a hundred feet from the ramp, I get an alarm for the Honda 130. After shutting it down and looking it over and reading the list of alarm tones and meanings, I guessed it to be indicating no fuel flow, and blamed it on the lines being emptied last week. Fired it back up, and it never missed another beat for the trip.
When we got out in the river a ways, I went back to test the kicker. After several attempts to get the thing to start, I remembered to put the clip back in the kill switch, and she fired right up. When we got back to home port today, I started it up to run it out of fuel, and all that came from the telltale water hole was steam. It had a good stream earlier, but now no water. I'll have to get hold of Les and find out what they did to get it working the last time.
The Wallas, which has worked great since getting it put back in, shut itself down after an hour or so on the way up the river. Took a while to figure out it was due to low voltage in the house battery. Switched it to charge, and then the stove worked fine. The fully charged battery should not have drained so quickly, so its off to Costco soon to replace two of the three batteries.
Before launching, I had replaced the 13" pitch prop that was on when we got the boat with a 15" pitch. The WOT would only get up to 5000 rpm, and I thought the speed was a little slow, too. Before heading home, I put the 13" prop back on, and the WOT went all the way up to 6000 rpm. Then I remembered that the GPS was set to knots instead of MPH (the last time we ran the boat was up around Dusty's house, and you gotta go knots there!), so the speeds were not so far off in the first place. Cruise speed is up around 18 mph at 4600 or so, and max speed got up close to 28 mph and was still gradually climbing when I throttled back down.
I discovered that the trim tabs are too small. Had to run with them fully extended to get the bow down, and then there was nothing left for lateral trim adjustments. I'm going to first try making some new tab plates (read: have the guys in the sheet metal shop at work make them) with a little more surface area. The plates now are 12" x 8 1/2", and I can go to 14 x 10 and still clear the kicker. Might have to notch the corners out a little deeper than Bennett does, but for free it is worth a try. If that doesn't work, I think I'll look into some 12 x 12 Lenco electrics.
Had a great little jaunt, though. Even got to see the Helen O on the river yesterday, and visted with Larry for a bit when he came down to the dock later. Plus, we went through a couple patches of thick fog, so the radar was cool. Of course the only thing I recognized for sure was the land on either side, but when you are in a river, it's good to stay between the shores.
So, now here's a question. Using Les' common sense guideline of cruising at 1000 rpm below WOT, will that Honda 130 care if she runs at 5000 rpm all day? That gives a water speed of just over 20 mph.