May 17th... Marsh Harbour, Abacos

After the weather I took my coffee over to "Fine Lion" to discuss our travel plans with Steve. The weather here is complicated right now with a low pressure system in Cuba and heading north toward Florida and a cold front coming south from the Carolina's. While neither of these are going to affect us directly, they are both large enough to influence the area through the first half of the week. There will be wind in the 30 knot range and thunderstorms with gusts higher.

Not knowing the nature of the storm in Cuba we decided to remain here for the day and wait for more information tomorrow.

Our first job this morning was to test the engine. When we arrived here, the overheating alarm sounded as were anchoring. We started it up and tried to duplicate the situation by running it up to temperature and the lowering the rpm's to idle. Sure enough, after 5 minutes the temperature gauge started to rise. When I increased the rpms to 1000 it cooled back to normal.

Interesting....I decided to think about the problem before taking any action. I topped off our tank from one of our jerry cans and loaded it into the dinghy along with all of our water containers and headed to the marina.

In thirty minutes of so I was on my way back with 6 gallons of diesel and 35 gallons of water which I promptly started loading into the water tank. Kathy had spent the morning cleaning.

After toasted cheesed sandwiches for lunch, I began working on the overheating problem. The fact that it overheated at low rpm was exactly the opposite of the last overheating problem that we dealt with a year and a half ago when we had an 80 percent blockage in the thru hull fitting.

The only thing that we have done in the last few weeks that remotely affect the system was when I was bleeding the engine heating hoses that go to our water heater. I lost the bleed screw and about a quart of antifreeze, which after fixing, I added back into the antifreeze reservoir.

Anyway, I started with the thru hull to make sure that is was clear. It was. Then I borrowed Steve's impeller puller and replaced ours. Finally, I removed the water line for the exhaust elbow to make sure that that area was clear. It was fine.

I didn't think that anything I'd done was going to make any difference, but was going to start the engine again to test it anyway. Before closing things up I decided to look at the manifold. On its top are a radiator fill cap and a pet-cock. I had bled the system using the pet cock a couple of years ago but rarely even look at it. When I removed the cap I could see that the coolant lever was down about an inch and a half. I had Kathy, who was waxing the cockpit at the time, hand down some antifreeze and I added about a pint. Since it still wasn't full I added another pint of water. After closing things up, I started the engine and ... presto, no overheating. Plus, we had a new impeller and a totally inspected cooling system.

We got some chicken thighs out of the freezer and read for an hour or so before dinner.

Steve and Kim stopped by for an hour or so before I fired up the grill.

We watched a movie in the evening and read a while before bed.