My friend, Andrew, told me that the blog was “unfiltered”, and until yesterday, I was unsure what he meant. Perhaps I erred in disclosing our melancholy and frustration over the engine work failure, but both the event and its disclosure are done. We’re both fine, just hit a low point with the continued inability of the mechanics to find a solution and our schedule of decommissioning in tatters. We have a lot of options and at some point, Wings will be in Raiatea prepared for cyclone season, and we’ll be back at home. As friend Peter says, “Remember - as with everything - this will pass and become a memory.”, and he’s right, of course. We both appreciate your good wishes and commentary. To paraphrase, it takes a community to fix a diesel.

We’ve determined that the used Bosch injector pump sent from England is now in Papeete, and needs to be claimed by SOPOM. To my knowledge, we’ve provided them with all of the necessary paperwork so we should have it in our hands on Monday sometime. Should the TDZ pump now on the engine continue to fail, if it’s the failure point, we do have that backup. Whichever pump runs the engine, we’ll return the other with us, have it rebuilt, and keep it aboard for future incidents. Kelly chided me about “critical spares” and an injector pump is certainly in that category. OK, Kelly..done!

We can determine the point at which the injector pump should squirt fuel into the cylinder by watching the valves on the engine. We’ll do that. We’ll see how that event aligns with the crankshaft pulley and its marks. We were told that the injector pump was timed by watching when the piston for #1 pump squirted fuel, and that point was marked. If the pump actually provides high pressure fuel to the injectors (they’ve been tested and approved and have only 300 hours on them, but I have a set of rebuilt ones if needed), then the engine should run. The engine started easily and ran well before the problem, so I doubt if the compression has changed.

I’d like to see the amount of high pressure fuel that the pump is delivering, but the mechanics have all said that it was adequate, and they’re supposed to know. On Friday before he departed, Daniel reassembled all of the parts, but did not insert the injectors into the pre-combustion chamber, but attached the injectors to the injector tubes (precisely-measured steel tubes that carry high pressure diesel fuel from the injector pump to the injectors) and I used the starter to rotate the engine. From my location I was unable to see the amount of fuel or the pattern of the fuel squirted by the injectors, but Daniel said that it was good. Again Daniel is a professional mechanic and should know. I’ve seen him work on 4-cylinder generators, so he has experience with smaller diesels. And the shop is a Nanni Diesel shop, too.

Conni and I discussed Daniel’s mysterious disappearance on Friday and we’re convinced that he was as frustrated as we and just didn’t come back. As I said earlier, he left all of his tools, the engine disassembled, and his outer clothing.

We’re hoping that the pro-mechanic from the other shop can see the path through this tangle. A fresh set of eyes can sometimes do that. There are now five sailboats with inoperative engines sitting on the transient dock now. The Danish boat’s crew has been forced to fabricate tools to remove injectors on their old Cummins diesel, and luckily there are three professional marine engineers aboard.

I’ll have the engine ready for work at 0700 on Monday morning, and we’ll see what happens. We do have high hopes that we can salvage most of our decommissioning time by leaving on Monday afternoon, but if we can’t, we’ll do something else.

My friend, Peter, also suggested burning a few chicken bones under the engine as a way to remove the curse. If any of you have expertise in this area, do let us know.