Every time I look at this, I find it disconcerting. See for yourself and tell me: do you find comfort seeing daylight coming from the bottom of a boat? Even glass-bottomed boats should only show you what the bottom of a harbor reveals. Here, Brio's bottom opens to the air. Not a good sign, certainly not a display of seaworthiness. The internal pod, a big, black block of machinery was dropped through the hole onto forklift arms as you will see shortly.
So, what happened to this black hunk of complicated machinery? Well, it's almost as if Brio "gave birth" to the internal pod by dropping it out of the boat. The forklift was the midwife and it gently lowered the pod to the floor, as you can see in this series of pictures.
And a little lower:
And a little lower:
Until the pod sits on the shop floor, together with its heavy-duty rubber gasket:
Next, the internal pod will be set aside where it can be cleaned.
And loaded onto a pickup truck to be taken to Charlie Murphy's shop for disassembly and analysis.
Charlie then trucks the pod to his workshop, disassembles it and finds that the hydraulic fluid reservoir for the steering system is filled with sludge. It would seem that in running Brio from the middle of the St. Lawrence River to Rimouski, which is about 6 nautical miles, on just the starboard engine and then requiring a number of very tight turns in the Rimouski Marina to fuel the boat, pump her out and then dock her after the impact with the log required the steering fluid to overheat and congeal.
At any rate, Charlie will now clean out the hydraulic system and replace the many valves and o-rings in order to rebuild the system to "like-new" condition. He hopes to have this done by Saturday, June 17th. If so, we might get a sea trial done and provision the boat on Monday, the 19th. We might cast off on the 20th.
And this is what the stern looks like today. Not only does the hull have a "hole in one", but Brio only has one pod installed.
The port pod is mounted with its propellers facing aft. The starboard pod is lying on the wood pallet under the port pod. And the repaired and refurbished propellers are lying on the pallet next to the starboard pod. These refurbished propellers had been on the starboard pod when they were hit by the submerged log.
A revised spreadsheet has us leaving on June 20th and would have us arrive home around August 11th.
Brio's chomping at the bit!
Cheers,
Brio
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