Worse things happen at sea
20 May 2016
Every day we have to run the engine for an hour or two to top up the batteries and there's a couple of things we have to check each time we hit the start button. We always check to see that we have cooling water coming out of the exhaust, we check the oil pressure gauge and we check to see that the rev counter, or tacho, is functioning. The tacho tells us that the alternator will be charging.
The tacho sometimes will fail to register and it's often because a small wire has jumped off its terminal on the alternator. It's a ten second job to pop this back on, it's no big deal. This happened on Tuesday morning so I went below to investigate. Then Jackie, who was in the cockpit, suddenly noticed that the water had stopped coming from the exhaust, so I immediately shut down the engine.
The first thought was that it would be a broken fan belt as this drives the water pump and the tacho, so I opened up the doors to the engine to have a look. The tacho wire was still attached to its tab and the fan belts hadn't snapped but something looked weird. The belts seem to have twisted and the main pulley wheel looked to be at a new and curious angle.
It wasn't until I loosened all the fittings and slackened the belts that we could see the problem. The drive pulley that should be bolted onto the crankshaft, wasn't. The massive bolt that holds it in place had broken and the pulley had parted from the engine. I removed the pulley and shone the torch at the end of the crankshaft and had one of those, 'oh shit!!!!' moments.
I held the large head of the bolt in my hand and peered at the other half that was still inside the hole at the end of the crankshaft. OK, we need a new bolt, and we need to get that broken bit out, but how? I needed a second opinion, so I called our friend Steve, who's a wiz at all things mechanical, and asked him to come and give me some advice.
English Steve is an ex-pat who did quite a bit of work for us when we first bought Picaroon here back in 2013. "This bolt hasn't just broken today it's been broken for some time" he said. "The only thing that has been holding this pulley on has been friction. Just thank your lucky stars that it broke here, whilst you were on anchor and not whilst you were out at sea". That sent a chill of relief through both of us, because although Picaroon is a sailboat we've always needed the engine to get us in and out of harbours as well as being available at sea when sailing isn't an option, opposing seas, lee shores or whatever other reason, it's essential.
"You could try to get the old bolt out with a centre punch and a small hammer but it may take while, I'll bring one over in the morning", Steve suggested.
Meanwhile we're now low on power, the batteries will need to be charged, and we don't have an engine. What we need is to borrow a generator until we can get this fixed so I head off to speak to Jeanso another friend of ours. He decides we need to have his friend Mike to have a look at the problem, he's seemingly got all the tools and the expertise to fix our broken pulley. "I'll call him"
Half an hour later Mike, who lives on his ketch a few hundred yards from us arrives on board Picaroon. He's retired but tops up his pension doing jobs like this, and has worked on engines all his life. "No problem, he says, I've got the very tools to get that bolt out. Then I also have a spare bolt that's the same as this broken one. I'll be over at 8 in the morning and we'll get it done. See if you can find the key that will be under the engine somewhere. If you can't find it I can make a new one, no problem"
Mike arrives next day with his can do attitude, tools and a generator. For an hour or so he works away, still confident that the bolt is going to come out. He's done this sort of job countless times but as time goes on it becomes clear that this may be a bolt too far, and now he's spotted another problem, which is more serious than the broken bolt. The keyway on the crankshaft has been damaged due to the loss of the retaining bolt, and the broken bits of the key will have gone into the engine. "This, says Mike, is not good"
For those who don't know about keys and keyways, it's just an oblong or half-moon shaped bit of metal that sits in a slot on the crankshaft, and a corresponding slot on the pulley. Its function is to stop the pulley rotating on the crankshaft. The slot, about a quarter of an inch deep has straight sides, but the one on our engine now has one straight side and one that's worn to an angle that won't hold the key tightly enough.
"It can be repaired" Mike tells us, it just needs a new slot milling into the shaft. Unfortunately to do this will mean taking the engine out, dismantling it, taking the crankshaft to a workshop, bringing it back to the boat, rebuilding the engine and popping it back in place. Suddenly a job that was going to cost a few hundred dollars has turned into a job that will cost over $2000.
Gloom descends on Team Williams and Picaroon.
We ran out of money for repairs three or four months ago and have been barely surviving on my pension since then. Picaroon has been for sale since we were in Jamaica and just recently, since we reduced the price, we've had two or three people who may be interested in buying her. One of them may even be coming to view her this week. That's Sods law for you.
The day before this disaster occurred we had formulated a plan regarding selling Picaroon. We would leave her here in the safe harbor of Salinas and return to our apartment in the Dominican Republic. The chances of finding a buyer in Puerto Rico was much more likely than if we took her to Luperon in the DR, although doing this was going to mean borrowing a lot of money from friends or relatives to tide us over until the boat was sold, it seemed like a good plan, and then the s**t hit the fan, or is that the fan belt pulley.
There's only one way out of this, we have to repair the engine on the good ship Picaroon, or we'll never find a buyer so we sent out some SOS emails. Thankfully my brother has offered to lend us the money to get the engine fixed, and Mike will start work on it in a couple of days. It will probably take two to three weeks until it's repaired and back in the boat.
Meanwhile plan A is on the backburner, the money to carry it out now swallowed by this disaster with the engine. Anyway worse things happen at sea, at least we're safely in port, and somehow, someway we'll muddle through.
It looks like the adventures of Picaroon still have a few chapters left until we experience the second of those two happiest days in a sailors life.
The day you buy the boat,.................................................................................... and the day you sell it.