Day 27: Detroit to Port Huron

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September 5, 2021: Troubleshooting a problem, crossing a lake, navigating a river.

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We were supposed to leave at 7 AM on Sunday morning, but that didn’t happen. Why? Well, the autopilot unit refused to power up. Although we didn’t need it to travel, if it needed a repair or replacement, it would be a lot easier to get that done at a major city like Detroit than to try to get it done in one of the small Michigan port towns ahead of us on our route.

Troubleshooting the AutoPilot

Troubleshooting is an exercise in logic and deduction. You consider the symptoms of the thing you’re troubleshooting and what could cause them. Then you check possible solutions, starting with the easiest ones, and check to see if it worked after each change.

The symptom was no power to the autopilot. The unit simply wouldn’t power up. Everything else on the panel — chart plotter, engine monitor — powered up with no problem.

So we went in search of something that would stop power from going to the unit. Had a circuit breaker been tripped? No. Was there a bad fuse in the line? This was a challenge requiring Capt Paul to explore the panel behind the unit. There was no fuse on the line to the unit. Then in the fuse panel back by where the battery switches lived, under the cockpit floor. Nothing was amiss.

He checked the manual for the boat, which includes wiring diagrams. Around then is when he realized/mentioned a few things:

• The autopilot gets its power from the NMEA (which he pronounced nee-ma) network.
• The NMEA system connects all kinds of electronic devices on board the boat so they can communicate with each other.
• The blue NMEA network indicator light in his sleeping area was not on.
• The Chart Plotter did not have any information from his engine system, despite the fact that they were both on.

This led him to logically conclude that the NMEA system was down. Unfortunately, the boat’s manual didn’t even mention this system. It was as if it didn’t exist.

Another step in troubleshooting is to consider anything that had changed since the last time the item was working. The system had been working the day before. What had changed since then?

Well, I was the only one on board most of the previous day. The only thing I’d done that was out of the ordinary was to use the stereo and to scrub down the back deck. And both of those things had been done before. Neither Paul nor I thought those actions could mess up the NMEA network.

We started digging deeper. He went on the TugNuts forum, which is an online group of Ranger Tugs owners. I went on Google. We were both searching for NMEA info as it applied to Ranger Tugs. I found a Ranger Tugs Q&A video on YouTube that included a six-minute segment about the system. We watched the relevant part of it together. Andrew Custiss, who had been in charge of service at Ranger back then, talked about what to look for if the system doesn’t start up. He directed us to a 3 amp fuse on a yellow wire coming off the battery.

Paul took another look at the wires by the battery switches. There were several yellow wires. Some were obviously for power higher than just 3 amps. None of them had inline fuses. He opened the battery compartment. More wires, some yellow. No fuses.

He went back into the fuse box behind the panel. There was just one 3 amp fuse and it was for the stereo. He pulled it out and we looked at it. It looked fine.

He knew that components of the NMEA system were located behind the refrigerator. He (and I) dreaded dragging it out. But we were running out of options.

He kept researching on TugNuts. He found two separate forum comments that mentioned the stereo. I confirmed that I had been playing around with settings on the stereo. Was it possible to turn off the NMEA network with the stereo? In what world would that make sense?

It was easy enough to check. I pushed the button to turn on the stereo. Nothing happened.

Paul admitted that he hadn’t put that 3 amp fuse back in. While I waited, he did.

I tried again. The stereo came back on. I got into the menu system and drilled down into Settings. There was an option for NRX Power. (Note that it didn’t say NMEA power.) I’d turned it off the day before in an attempt to fix the bluetooth connection gaps. I turned it back on. The autopilot immediately came to life.

The answer to my earlier question — In what world would it make sense for a stereo to control a boat’s backbone network system? — is this world.

Troubleshooting had taken about two hours. We figured that we could have been done in a fraction of the time if somewhere in the boat’s manual it had mentioned the connection between the stereo system and the NMEA network. If it had, I would have realized immediately that I’d fiddled with something I shouldn’t have the day before and we could have fixed it.

But then I wouldn’t have this crazy story to tell.

Under Way

We got under way not long after that. With the autopilot fully functional, we just followed its path. It led us to where the Detroit River met up with Lake Saint Clair and then started us on a diagonal path across the lake. Oddly, instead of putting us right into the shipping channel, it set a course to the west of that. It made a lot of sense; why would we want to be in the shipping channel with big ship traffic when we could be off to the side?

Of course, our autopilot wasn’t the only thing putting a boat in the lake just off the shipping channel. There were a bunch of fishing boats with the same strategy. So Capt Paul eventually had to turn off the auto pilot and use the heading feature to maneuver around them. Eventually, that put us on the other side of the channel. It didn’t really matter. The fishing boats and other small boat traffic was on both sides of the channel as well as in the channel, going both ways.

Here’s one of the freighters we passed in Lake Saint Clair.

At the north end of the lake, the Saint Clair River’s delta — for lack of a better term — offered several channels for entering the river and continuing the trip north. The autopilot had picked one of the channels and when I took over at the helm just before reaching the area, I just followed it. Apparently the cargo ship traffic uses the various smaller channels in one direction only and we were going with the flow of big ship traffic in our channel. But there was no big ship traffic. In fact, there was very little other traffic at all.

The mouth of the Saint Clair River. You can see the path we took by the dashed yellow line, but there were several options.

All that changed the farther north we got. Maybe because it was later in the day. Maybe it was because it was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. But it didn’t really matter; traffic picked up along the way. It was like a repeat of the day before.

I sat at the help for my two hours and then Capt Paul turned it over to Dianne, which really surprised me. She hadn’t driven the boat in days and I assumed it was because she didn’t want to. Even she seemed surprised. With at least an hour left to go, I slipped down into our sleeping area and fell asleep almost immediately.

I woke up, hearing them talking about where the fuel was. They had turned into the Black River at Port Huron and were jockeying with other traffic to find a fuel dock. I put my shoes on and went out onto the bow as they figured out where to go and brought the boat in. Soon we had it tied up at the largest fuel dock we’d been at, with about a half dozen pumps serving gasoline, diesel, or both. I walked down to the office and got a dock girl to help us with the pump. Dianne pumped the fuel while the girl mostly waited, looking cute. (It turned out that most of the folks working at docks in that town were in their late teens and looked cute in their matching shorts and polo shirts. Fortunately, the ones at the marina we went to later were more helpful.)

Here’s some of the boat traffic in the Black River. You can see the long fuel dock in the center of the photo, on the right side of the river; I took this photo after lunch from near the Military Street bridge.

After fueling, we made a U-turn with all the other traffic and headed up the Black River. We had to wait for two drawbridges. Our marina was on the right past the second drawbridge. There were a few minutes where we didn’t know where to go — I had no idea what was going on inside the boat because I was still half asleep and sitting on the bow — and then they had a slip number. One of the cute dock girls was waiting for us and helped tie us up with a nice knot that proved she knew what she was doing. Then she left us alone to hook up our power connection and finish settling in.

Here’s our Nebo log for Day 27. You can follow our progress — we’ll be on the water until at least the end of September — on the Nebo boating app. Just look for Nano Paul G.

An Afternoon in Port Huron

For some reason, it was taking my companions even longer than usual to get off the boat that afternoon. So I headed down to the office to check us in, get any codes we needed to access the restroom and showers, and find out where there might be a good place to eat. The overnight fee was only $25, which I thought was a pretty good deal, and I got a piece of paper with the codes, the wifi password, and a map of local restaurants and shops. The dock girl pointed out a few of her favorite places to eat.

I met my companions on the way back to the boat. We split up again; I remembered that I hadn’t shut off the GoPro camera I’d run during the trip — I hope to have that video online soon — and went back to the boat to do that. Capt Paul hit the restrooms and Dianne just waited. Reunited again, we set up for Martina’s restaurant (which I’d heard as Martinez restaurant). We got there just before the early evening rush and managed to get a high top table in the bar, not far from a big open window. It was the closest we could get to eating outdoors and it seemed to satisfy my companions.

We had a nice lunch of gringo style Mexican food. Service could have been better, though. In the end, the server didn’t bring the checks. Dianne went to the bar to get them. Then she went back to the bar to pay hers. I decided that I’d wait for the server to come to pay mine. I absolutely detest when a server seems to forget service at the end of a meal and waiting 20 minutes to get a check had put me in a foul mood.

After our meal, we walked back to the boat. I took a bunch of pictures of the bridges going up with boats passing beneath them. It was incredibly busy on the river, but just about every boat followed the No Wake rules and the water remained remarkably calm.

Here’s the Military Street drawbridge, open for traffic. The bascule bridge in the background remains open all of the time.

I’m not sure — again, I’m writing this a few days after the fact and my memory is hazy — but I think I napped for the rest of the afternoon. I know I didn’t finish any blog posts. I was honestly burnt out from writing and had been reading a lot again. But before I turned in for my nap, we’d pretty much decided to spend an extra day in Port Huron due to high winds and possibly season out on Lake Huron the next day. I’d have plenty of time to do more writing.