Engine Gremlins
26 August 2011 | 200 miles from Cape Flattery
Tommy
Just a quick update as I've spent most of my watch fiddling with sails and the starboard engine and not had the usual quiet night watch more amenable to waffling away on the laptop. The winds are light and maintaining a good angle to Cape Flattery requires frequent adjusting of the sails and autopliot.
We're about 200 miles from the Cape but more south than we'd like so spent some time yesterday motorsailing north in very light NNE winds so as to have a better sailing angle once the NW winds fill in as expected in the next 24 hours.
But the engine gremlins had other ideas and the slight vibration that we'd noticed in the port engine the last day or so increased dramatically last night and on checking I noticed water in the saildrive oil....AGAIN!!! Two possible reasons I think. We may have picked up some fishing line in the prop or the shaft may be a little out of alignment. When I changed the seals in Papeete I wondered whether the shaft may not be quite straight but the main machine shop said they could only look at it in a week to 10 days. That meant a further delay in our departure to Hawaii and another 10 or more days in the boatyard at $60/day. Guess we'll be hauling out again at Canoe Cove, our fourth haulout in just over a year three of them saildrive related!!
Then the starboard engine started losing power. After a quick check in the wee hours it looks as though we may have water in the fuel. Will change filters this morning and hold thumbs that that is the problem. Sigh!!
While I was checking out the engine I noticed we were on a collision course with a vessel on AIS (the vessel identification system that all commercial boats have to carry these days). We can receive signals on AIS but don't transmit our position so I wasn't sure that they knew I was there. After several calls on the VHF radio they responded and it turned out they were a tug with a barge about 3/4 of a mile behind. We were already hard on the wind and bearing off wasn't going to help avoid a close encounter so the tug skipper kindly altered course to pass behind us. As we approach the busy waters of Juan de Fuca we're glad to have this little piece of equipment on board.
Well the sun's up and we have mainly blue skies. Just been up on deck ( the lazy jacks that control the mainsail when we take it down have come loose on the port side...another little job for today)...anyway just been up on deck and I don't know if it's just wishful thinking but I got my first whiff of land!!! A musty foresty kind of smell...Yahooo!!! We're getting close now.
..then again. Maybe it was my socks.