November 21, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
What would cruising be if there were no surprises?
We woke up on the morning of November 20 at Buck Island Harbor. It was very early, as are all our days on this jaunt. We wanted to get across Albemarle Sound and past the Alligator River. Our first act every morning now is to turn on the engine so we can run the inverter for grinding and brewing coffee. (The generator is another story for another day. Be sure you have redundancy in all critical systems, and be sure that the cruising gremlins will strain your ability to provide enough layers of same.) Larry turned on the fuel pump, and then tried to turn on the engine, and that was the great moment of truth. The truth was that the engine was not going to start.
Before I tell you about the engine, I’ll tell you about my own redundant backups. When I was employed, I was a database administrator. If you think that system administrators are anal about backups, dba’s are moreso. In fact, as a dba, no matter what the system administrator told me about his/her backups, I always managed to find some way to make a backup of my own that I could rely on when the system backups failed to meet my needs. And that happened way too often.
Now that I am retired, I am as avid about protecting my morning coffee as I ever was about assuring database backups. We have had too many issues with electrical systems and diesel engines and so forth for me to think that I can safely rely on an electric coffee grinder and an electric coffeemaker. When I bought food for our journey, I bought one pound of ground coffee and stashed it for this moment.
It all goes back to motorcycle days. When we were first married we used to travel on a motorcycle and camp out. We made coffee by boiling water and throwing in some ground coffee. After the coffee had five minutes or so to brew, we dipped it out carefully and it was quite good coffee. So on this delightful morning when our engine refused to start, we did not have to do without coffee. I hauled out my stash and made what Larry calls “cowboy coffee.” We drank our coffee while Larry mulled over the situation. I assure you that the fact that we were able to have coffee anyway made the whole day work better.
Larry spent about five hours with wrenches, screwdrivers and few choice words working on the engine. The day before we had casually said to each other that if something happened that made it necessary, we could always dinghy back to Coinjock; it was only six miles. However, as Larry was fighting with the demons of diesel, the winds were ramping up in excess of 20 knots. It was no day for a six-mile dinghy ride. If no real solution could be crafted, then something had to be jury-rigged. The engine must be compelled, willy-nilly, to run.
Two bad things had happened. First, Larry discovered that the fuel line was blocked. When he attempted to run fuel through the filter, hardly any came through. Task #1 was to clear that fuel line. And wouldn’t you know that the one item that could possibly do that task was buried in the most inaccessible space in the boat? It was in a box of assorted remnants of electrical cable, all stuffed at the bottom of the locker under the locker behind the forward settee. When we stored that box way down there, we said that there would be no need for wiring any time soon. Ha! The cruising gremlins giggled all morning as we pulled out boxes and bags and paraphernalia that had been piled and stuffed on top of the box we needed. Our boat is none too tidy on its best day, and this was not by any means its best day, unless you mean the best WORST day. It was a frightful mess, but Larry found a piece of cable that was just the right size to push through the fuel line and unclog it.
That done, he encountered task #2: fix or replace the fuel pump. Even with the fuel line clear, the fuel pump was not moving fuel. This was a much more serious problem. We could not go to Coinjock for parts and pieces, and who knew if anybody there would have what we needed anyway? However, Larry soon realized that we had exactly what we needed, exactly where we did not need it to be. The generator is a diesel engine, and its fuel filter was not needed, because the generator was not being used (another story, as I told you earlier). He scavenged the fuel pump from the generator and installed it on the auxiliary engine, and voila`. We had power in the power zone.
The cruising gremlins are always working had to keep us from having any fun, but we ignore their agenda. We have our own: just keep trucking, or rather, just keep cruising.
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