2008 Week 42 in Review
October 12 to October 18, 2008
A visit to the Sakarissa
I finished my trip to Portland by visiting the Sakarissa, which is tied up in the Columbia River:
It's a World War II tug (YTM-269), powered by a DMQ 8 Enterprise (serial number 41119). It has a new governor, a new seawater pump, and a Sperry steering system (with a few problems). Jerry gave us a great tour all throughout the boat.
Back to business
After I got back from Portland, I did some cleaning at the shop and found some interesting links to share. Here's an old but interesting article about my friend Rick Boggs (and yes, two of the photo captions are mixed up), and here's the website for the Tugboat Enthusiasts Society. Check out their article on Enterprise diesels.
I also got a long email from Doug Leen about his experience with Mercs. He's also posted it to his blog, so you can read about it all here.
Lead ballast for the Catalyst
On Friday, I picked up about 2,000 pounds of lead to help ballast the Catalyst a little better. I had to borrow Dan's truck to haul it up to Port Townsend in one load.
While in Port Townsend, I stopped by Sirens for a drink with Crystal. We ran into Lee Ehrheart, the marine surveyor who works on the Adventuress and other local historic ships. I guess it's hard to go to PT without running into boat people.
The Duwamish... Finished?!?
I finally finished the work on the fireboat Duwamish's air compressor and got it all put back together. I was planning on test-running it, but I had to transfer fuel by hand and ran out of time for the day. I'll run it for a while next week and see what kind of pressure we can get out of it now.
A visit to Seattle's sewage pumps
Nick took me on a tour of the sewer pump facility in Interbay, where all of downtown Seattle's waste water and rain water is pumped out to the treatment plant. They use three big 48-inch pumps, one electric, one Waukesha natural gas engine, and one Chicago Pneumatic natural gas engine:
The city's planning to replace them all with electric motors, with a diesel generator on standby. Nick loves the old diesels and wanted to show off the Chicago Pneumatic a bit before it goes.
Community dinner
Everywhere I go, I run in to folks who are connected to heavy-duty diesel engines.
On Thursday Lia (naturalist on the Catalyst) and I (relief engineer on the Catalyst) attended one of the communal dinners that Chef Anne Catherine (cook on the Catalyst) holds. We arrived, and there were Eric (former engineer on the Catalyst) and Laura (with Eric, owner of the Atlas-Imperial-powered Newt). We were joined a little later joined by Hugh and Teresa (owners of the Atlas-powered Westward).
We all sat with fifteen others for an amazing dinner of fresh, local ingredients prepared by Chef Anne Catherine, who told about how each had been acquired from a local farmers' market. After dinner, we went for a nightcap at the Ballard Smoke Shop and ran into Harry (engineer on the Atlas-powered Velero IV).
Small world.
