The windless and outboard continue to work so I’m ready for another challenge. On the 24 hour leg from Mantenchen Bay to Mazatlan I noticed water in the bilge. Not a lot but Vagari is the driest boat I have ever sailed. I checked all the normal places, the fittings where hoses go thru the hull and where the prop shaft exits the hull. Sure enough water was coming in thru the packing gland on the prop shaft. This is designed to leak a few drops a minute but more than that was coming now. Not a problem because the packing gland is designed to be adjusted so the amount of water coming in can be controlled. I had never worked on one of these fittings but I understood how they worked. I couldn’t back off the 2 1/2” locknut. I worked on it for an hour or so in the morning without success. So I took a nap after lunch and then I was able back off the locknut and make the adjustment. We will see how good I was on the next passage.
We had another potential problem. At night the charging light on the engine panel glowed. It was so dim you couldn’t see during the day. As luck would have the local rep for the make of engine in Vagari was a dock neighbor. He found the problem in a flash, a little corrosion in a wiring harness, so easy to fix I could do it in a few minutes. But why do we have corrosion? Because my mixer elbow where the hot exhaust gases are mixed and cooled with the seawater that comes out of the heat exchanger. The el
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