23-5 Keeping the Sea out of the Boat

If you are reading this then the boat is still floating. Whew.

One of the most important rules of boating is "keep the ocean on the outside of the boat". So it was with much trepidation that I intentionally created a larger hole where a small one existed. All while floating in our slip in St. Pete.

Let me back up a bit and I apologize if I dive into the weeds. So, where our prop shaft enters the boat there has to be some sort of mechanism that a)keeps the water out of the boat and b)cools the prop shaft as it turns. There are various items that fall in the topic of "shaft seals", and can be described in to two main categories: Ones that drip on purpose with a packing gland and ones that drip-less. I have one of the drip-less ones and it was starting to drip-more. See picture:

That picture is a Tides SureSeal and that is exactly what is on Utopia. Over the past few months there has been a small drip that has been present during motoring. During the recent Gulf crossing that drip increased a pretty good bit to the point that the bilge pump was going off more often than I like. So after some research, and the leaking getting worse by the day, I realized that more than likely it had a worn lip seal. Luckily this shaft seal has a spare lip seal just riding the shaft for this particular situation (see picture of Optional Spare Seal Carrier). So while in the water you can take the assembly apart, remove the old worn out lip seal (by cutting it off) and slide the new one in place. During this process water is free to enter the boat at an alarming rate (for a short period of time) during the supposedly 10-minute process. Did it work??

Sort of. The process was pretty straight forward and went quite quick. Everything came apart as planned, the old lip seal was removed and cut off then the new one installed quickly with only a few gallons (if that) getting in the bilge (see videos and pictures).

Unfortunately, once everything was put back together there was still a leak (albeit lessened). This was not entirely unexpected since the assembly is over 10 years old and that is somewhat past the service life of the entire system. So that probably means a haul out is needed to pull the prop shaft and put a whole new seal on.

Right now it is not an emergency since it only really leaks when the engine is on but it's enough that we want to get it solved before we leave in October. There might be a solution that will help us limp by until we had a schedule haul out for a bottom paint in April 2024 but that will be another post.

Here is a couple of videos that show some of the process:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ea6b_88aa159f8211441f96d6a0ae8dab2596/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ea6b_b98f91c7d0cc4703bd5d176abbce39fa/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

23-5