On the weekend of Father’s Day I went out on the boat to what I did not expect to be a promising day of fishing.
Recently I downloaded an ap called “Fishing Calendar” by Mobile Software. This ap supposedly takes into consideration the Moon and Sun phases along with the tides and other tangents and predicts the daily “fishing efficiency”. Last weekend it predicted Sunday to be at 64%. I made matters more difficult by launching at 9 AM. We were at my targeted fish spot by 11 AM and as expected the fishing was non-existent to the point that my girlfriend who refuses to go offshore in boat asked me how I thought the seas would be offshore!
All we caught were some undersized Lane Snappers and after dodging a rain cloud we took off to the Miami River. Once there we went up the River and entered “Little River”. The view was amazing as the canal was lined up with boats behind nice residents. In over 50 years in Miami I had no clue this area existed. As we were navigating the narrow stretch we reached the end and had to turn back. As I did I was a submerged palm frond in the water and it went under the boat and jammed against my engine. I immediately turned off the engine.
I had to dislodge the frond and began to raise the engine. To my dismay the trim motor did not activate. I went on and using the fileting knife I cut the frond to pieces and successfully dislodged it from the engine.
We had an entire box of chum left and about two dozen shrimp but Rosemary was starved and I did not want to continue fishing with the prospect of having problems at the dock. I decided to call it a day.
Sure enough when I arrived at the dock I could not get the engine to go up. I diagnosed the problem as a discharged battery but the engine would turn on without any hesitation. I knew the trim motor has two solenoids and my next idea was to check these out. However the solenoids are mounted on the side and there was not possible way to look at them so I had to dismount the motor from it’s bracket. Once I did I realized that one of the wires, a 2” ground bridge wire, had rusted and come loose. I simply touched the wire to the solenoid terminal and the engine went up.
Note the loose wire on the right
That week I cleaned and replaced the wires on the solenoid with heat shrink connections and liquid tape on the connections that were not heat shrunk. I would have liked to change the nuts with stainless steel fittings but I realized standard fittings do not fit Arco Solenoids. The following week I was ready to go out again.
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