Do You Smell Oil?

On our third day of early morning coasting along Puerto Rico's south coast, we were heading for Cayo Aurora, better known by the locals as Gilligan's Island. Rumor has it that the locals gave it that name because it looks like the island in the TV show and one of the local fishermen looked like Bob Denver. Silly but true?

Anyway, when I told the mechanic I was at Cayo Aurora he responded "where???". So I tried "Gilligan's Island", and he replied"Oh, yeah... you'll have no problem getting to Ponce then". So, regardless of what the chart says, it is called Gilligan's Island. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We were within about a mile or so out of Cayo Aur... er, I mean, Gilligan's Island when I started smelling something I did not want to smell, in fact I tried to convince myself that nah, it can't be THAT. (Can you say "denial" boys and girls?). Gear oil. Synthetic gear oil has a smell that is hard to mistake. It stinks. So, I started wandering around the boat... first forward to see if the smell was coming from somewhere in front of us. Nope. So it's us. Maybe I didn't clean up the motor oil I spilled when topping off the engine... but it doesn't smell like engine oil. It smells like gear lube. Jen noticed my preoccupation as well as the smell and asked if we were burning oil. No, I said, not burning, but something's not right. We throttled down that engine a little, made the anchorage off Gilligan's Island and I started checking things out. The sump under the engine had a small pool of greenish smelly synthetic gear oil. Our upper sail drive gearbox shaft seal was shot.

While Jen and Quinn joined Kathy and John (our friends on Oceana) exploring Gilligan's Island, I poked around the engine a little to confirm the problem, called a mechanic I knew in Ft Lauderdale to get his opinion, and then began the chore of finding a mechanic in Puerto Rico. My first call struck gold. I called the Ponce Yacht and Fishing Club and asked them for a recommendation. I received two. The first recommendation was Luis Santos, and I had no need to call the second. After about 15 minutes on the phone I was convinced I'd found a good mechanic. He had a good understanding of Yanmar sail drives as he asked me all the right questions to confirm that I had diagnosed the problem correctly, he was happy to discuss the problem with me, and spoke very good English, which was a big help to me since my Spanish is awful.

So, with a slip reserved in Ponce Yacht Club for the repair and a mechanic lined up for the following week, we motored on over to Ponce to get the shaft seal repaired.

It has been said that the correct definition of Cruising is: "fixing you boat in exotic locations". So it is at times.