Dripless shaft seal leaks

After driving my boat, I noticed some water in the compartments under the dripless drive shaft seals. In order to get a better idea of what was going on, I monitored the seals while the main engines were run at different RPM settings. At lower RPMs, I saw small bits of water spurting from the seals periodically. At higher RPM, water actually sprayed from the port seal. That's not good! (click for video) I tried tightening the tension of the springs by loosening the set screws on the carbon ring and sliding the ring toward the back of the boat. This helped some, but there was still some water leaking at higher RPMs. Of course dripless seals are not supposed to drip any water. At this point, the next step would be to try cleaning/sanding the seal's carbon flange and rotor, but since I was planning to haul the boat out for bottom paint soon, I decided to wait until then to do any further work on the seals. I'm not crazy about having water gush into the boat while cleaning the flanges. (When inspecting the seals after the haul out, I found that considerable work would need to be done to clean them, with no guarantees that they wouldn't leak afterwards. Also, the springs were nearly worn out. So, I decided to replace the seals.)

Jim Geier
Cheoy Lee Trawler 55

Burned shore power connector

I noticed that the AC appliances on the boat stopped working while running on dock power. Checked the dock circuit breaker (still on) and volt meter (read 110 volts instead of 250 volts). After wiggling the shore power cord at the boat end of the cable, the appliances started working again and volt meter read 250 volts, then everything quit again after a few hours. Disconnected the shore power cable from the boat and found the connectors on the cable / boat badly burned / corroded (see pics below). This could have been caused (by the recent previous owner) disconnecting the shore power cable without first shutting off the shore power. The wires inside the boat leading to the boat connector were very stiff near the ends attaching to the boat connector (see pic below), likely resulting from high current caused by the corroded connections. Replaced both the male shore power connector and female boat-side connector. To enable good current flow, cut off the stiff ends of the wires and reconnected the resulting good wires to the boat-side connector. Tips: TURN POWER OFF BEFORE DISMANTLING TOUCHING ANY OF THE WIRES!!! and take photos of the wiring before disconnecting wires in case you forget how to rewire it when putting everything back together.

Jim Geier
Cheoy Lee Trawler 55