Tuesday, May 18, 2010

BVI to Ft Lauderdale- Day 5

Yesterday and today have been somewhat eventful. Yesterday was our 7th wedding anniversary. We celebrated with a steak dinner of Steak au Poivre with sherry mustard sauce, green beans and basmati rice. Alas, no wine as we maintain a dry boat when on a passage. We’ll revisit the celebrations once we are in Ft Lauderdale.

With light winds, we had the Gennaker up yesterday morning until around 10AM when gusty winds and local squall activity prompted us to roll it in. We managed to get it in a “figure 8” while furling it, which is a bit of a pain. Of course I was quite collected about the whole thing and only shouted when necessary for her to hear me from the bow over the wildly flogging sail. Once we managed to clear up the mess and furl the sail, Jen mentioned that I was shouting at her. My reply that “you couldn’t hear me from the bow unless I shouted” was noted, and then I was reminded that I continued to shout when she was standing right next to me. Apparently I channeled Captain Bligh again. On our anniversary. Oops. Jen was pretty nice about the whole thing, though.

For the rest of the day and evening we made good time with winds in the mid teens and speeds of 6.5 – 7.5 knots. By 1AM this morning the wind died down and we cranked up the port engine to keep our speeds in the low 6’s. Sometime early yesterday we passed our halfway point.

At 7:30 this morning, the engine over-temperature alarm went off and we shut it down. After inspecting the strainer and finding no debris, noting that the coolant overflow was at the normal level and the fan belt is ok, I elected to restart the engine to see if we had raw water flow instead of opening the raw water impeller plate to inspect the impeller, which involves wrapping oneself around a toasty warm engine. The engine started, the over-temp alarm sounded and then shut off, and we noted that plenty of water was ejecting from the exhaust. Hmmm. Maybe it was seaweed or a plastic bag blocking the intake, which subsequently fell off. So we hoped.

About 2 hours later the over-temp alarm went off again. Same drill, only this time I went overside to visually inspect the raw water intake. It looked normal (and the surrounding water was the most amazing deep blue). We restarted the engine and it’s raw water flow is once again just fine. We’ve discussed our options and we decided to continue running on the port engine for a while to see if the alarm goes off again. When it does, we’ll check the exhaust for water flow prior to shutting down the engine. If water flow is not OK, then I believe we have some blockage inside the sail drive that is getting stuck in the seacock upstream of the raw water pump, and then falling back down the sail drive when the engine is shut off, effectively but temporarily unblocking itself. I feel the impeller and heat exchanger are not faulty as we have very good raw water flow when we restart.

If the raw water flow is OK while the alarm’s sounding, we’ll leave the engine off overnight to cool completely down and I’ll check the coolant level in the heat exchanger. The overflow tank is at the proper level but maybe something is preventing it from feeding the coolant back into the engine and we have a low coolant problem. That will be easily corrected. If neither of these are the problem, I’ll poke around the plumbing of the cooling system and coolant pump as best I can to look for a problem. Failing that, we’ll rely on the starboard engine for the rest of the trip, transferring fuel from the port tank if and as required. We’ll leave the port engine off except for when we need it for maneuvering. It’s nice to have two! (except when working on the maintenance list).

So, as I write this Jen’s showering (jealous of my swim, I suspect), Quinn’s napping, and I’m fantasizing about an ice cold beer. Mmmmm.

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