Spoke to soon part 2
05 June 2014 | Puteri Harbor Marina
raining.
I spoke to soon. Things went farther south but we got very lucky.
Yesterday, we went shopping at one of the local malls. Gone for a couple of hours. When we came back, I turned on the faucet to get some water. No water. No pump. Strange. I pulled up the floor boards to check the pump only to find water about 6 inches under the board! We were taking on water and the bilge pump hadn't come on. I started pumping the manual bilge pump as Tracy started pulling up more boards to look for leaks. We changed places after a couple of minutes. We'd had a bit of water in the bilge earlier but with all the rain and with our deck leaks, it was pretty much normal for there to be some water down there. Not this much! I opened the engine room doors to find water streaming from a hole in the transmission oil cooler! I'd looked in the engine room a day or so ago as I went about checking to see if any of the water might have been coming from the raw water intake or the through hulls that are in the room as well as around the boat. I never saw any kind of leak like this. I stuck my finger over the hole as Tracy headed for the through hull to shut it off. We'd had a problem with it getting stuck before even after rebuilding it and it did it again. We swapped out places and I got it closed. Leak stopped. Now the fun part of taking every thing out from under the floorboards[lots of food] and getting the mess cleaned up. On the advise of an earlier cruiser friend{Thanks Jay Wiggins}, I'd kept two on board as back ups. He's told me to change out the coolers every thousand hours of engine running as it's not so much "if" they will fail, it's "when". I took out the old one and put in one of my spares[now to order another] before Tracy had everything out of the storage areas under the floorboards. Not that I'm fast, it's more that there was so much under there and lots had to be thrown away as salt water and food shouldn't mix. Best thing about it is that we found the better part of a case of Heiniken Beer we didn't know we had.
After a couple of hours, the fresh water pump started working again but I need to go in and check it's wires and get it rinsed with fresh water and dried. It will probably still need to be replaced but I think I have another pump on board. It's like I've written before, when you are out cruising, get as many spares for the important systems as you can as you never know when you will need them. At the worst, I can get another in Singapore on Saturday. I also have to check the float switch that should have kicked on the bilge pump and didn't. It's hard to depend on something only to have it fail when you really need it. We're just glad we hadn't left the boat for a land trip. The damage could have been much worse. If it had to happen, we're just lucky that it happened here where we can get parts if we need them. You just have to look on the "sunny" side of things.