We had been planning this trip and preparing the boat for months. The departure day was finally here. We were well provisioned and just received a shipment of tools and accessories from the Meyer girls at Ace Homeworks - (love them!), we were all set. It was the beginning of our adventure.
We left the marina with clear skies at 0730 to the music of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (better known as the opening music to 2001 Space Odyssey) playing from our friend Matt's boat. Very moving.
When we brought Bliss home from Seattle we navigated the Columbia River at night and found that it was not the most fun thing to do. Since this was our vacation and we had time, we decided to travel on the river by day only. Rainier is about halfway between Portland and Astoria on the river so we decided to stay there on Saturday night. After clearing the Interstate Bridge and Vancouver KQ9049 Railroad bridge we headed down river to our first destination.
About an hour before reaching Rainier, I (Sean) went below to make lunch. I heard a loud ticking noise coming out of the engine compartment under the companionway steps. I opened the top step and the noise got louder. I knew this was not a normal sound and decided to investigate further. I removed the companionway steps, which gives full access to the engine, and noticed one of the alternator belts was coming apart. We got the boat out of the traffic lane and turned off the engine. I cut the remainder of the belt off with a knife to prevent it from damaging anything. We started the engine back up and motored slowly to Rainier. We managed to get to the docks without any problem. Even though we had a spare belt, we decided to buy a replacement rather than deplete our spares. We had not replaced the two large alternator belts before so we called our friends Bill and Yvonne for some advice on how to replace them. Bill assured us that it's quite easy. We called a cab to get us to the auto parts store in Longview to pick up replacement belts. We weren't sure we were going to see Bliss again when the redneck driver of the dark-tinted-window cab started talking about guns - especially after we saw how excited he was about his assault rifle that he keeps above his bathroom door. :)
After returning safely to the boat we set about replacing the belts (we found out that we have to replace both belts at the same time). Bill was right, it was actually quite simple. The adjustment arm made tensioning the belts easy. We fired up the engine for about five minutes and monitored the movement of the belts and the motion looked good.
We broke and alternator belt coming out of the river. We managed to fix it fairly quickly, so we made a nice dinner to celebrate our first breakdown of the trip!
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| New Alternator Belts |
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| Broken Alternator Belt |
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| Dock at Rainier http://marinas.com/view/marina/3833_City_of_Rainier_Marina_OR_United_States |