Because of tide times and the marina gate closing at 12.56 and not reopening until 19.11, the planned daysail on Saturday 4th September was going to be a long one.
Arthur set the lines and after the usual round of checks I started the engine and we sprung off the pontoon at 10.30, and motored out of the marina, into the main channel and down the Conwy.
Once out into the bay we put the mainsail up, unfurled the genoa, switched off the engine and sailed. The sea state was 2 (smooth) and the westerly wind was a light 4-5kts. The instrumentation in the header photograph for this post (if you zoom in) shows us making 3kts against an unfavourable headwind of 6kts, which isn’t shabby progress.
We turned towards Puffin Island and after about 40 minutes, when about 2nm away, gybed and headed further out to sea but back in the general direction of Great Orme Head.
As we maintained our heading, we ran through gybing and tacking drill, but the winds stayed light and constant, so helming the course was no great hardship.
We drank tea, I ate a couple of bacon cobs.
Having made good progress, we gybed again and headed back to Puffin Island, but this time making for a close pass on the seaward side.
The number of seals basking on the rock was staggering – easily in the mid-hundreds.
One of them swam out towards the boat; I immediately nicknamed him ‘Bob’, for obvious reasons 🙂
After Puffin Island we changed course and headed into and down the Menai. Traffic was medium; the local sailing club had two classes of small boats out running in a formal competition. We didn’t want to interfere so at approximately 16.00 we gybed and began tacking back up the Menai towards Puffin Island. The wind, in the Menai, was somewhat firmer but the sea state remained slight; at times we were sailing in 18kt gusts, but the average was a steady 12kts; our speed over ground (SOG) indicator said we were making a steady 6-6.5kts, which wasn’t too shabby.
We looped around Puffin Island and headed back towards the Conwy. As we approached the first marker Arthur dropped the mainsail and furled the genoa and I started the engine.
Some minutes later there was a shrill alarm in the main cabin. It was the ‘engine overheating’ alarm. A large proportion of fires on yachts occur because the engine overheats and causes ignition.
I leaned over the stern and could see the exhaust wasn’t pumping water out. A quick tutorial on marine diesel engines. They suck up seawater and circulate it through the engine in a cooling jacket, then expel the water through the engine exhaust. The mechanism that does all these things is a hard rubber ‘propeller-like’ wheel, called an impeller.
I stopped the engine, Arthur went to the bow and lowered the anchor. We took the covers off the engine and checked the fanbelt tension (which was OK). Arthur asked if I had a spare impeller. I got one out of the navigation table. He asked if I had a toolkit aboard. I gave him a choice of three.
Because the sea state was still slight and we had no sails up, the boat was pretty stable on the anchor. Arthur removed the impeller cover. The impeller in there looked brand new (it was replaced when I had the engine serviced in February). He replaced the cover, I started the engine and leaned over the stern looking for water being expelled in the exhaust. There was none.
We shut off the engine and disconnected the impeller input and output pipes and began to hear voices. I looked outside. A yacht (Jameela) was motoring around our stern, the skipper was asking if we needed a tow. We explained we were trying to fix the problem. He said he would go back to his mooring but if we needed assistance we were to give him a shout on the VHF and he’d come back and give us a tow in. What a nice guy!
The impeller input and output pipes looked normal. Arthur levered the impeller out of its housing and examined it from all angles then, satisfied it looked good, refitted it and put the cover back on. Then we heard voices again.
I looked outside, it was Icarus, a yacht that is normally berthed next to Good Mood. Instead of shouting we had a chat over the VHF. Icarus offered to assist us back to the marina. I explained we had an overheating engine and that we had just taken things apart, could see no fault, and were just about to try it again. Icarus said they’d wait around to see how things panned out.
I restarted the engine, put the selector into neutral and put some noisy revs through it. After what seemed like an age but was probably no more than 20 seconds, the exhaust started spurting water in the normal way. I increased and decreased the engine revs, everything behaved normally. We agreed that the input had probably sucked up some gunk, and that had been cleared. I put the engine covers back on while Arthur lifted and stowed the anchor and chain.
Icarus kindly offered to stick with us, just in case, so we motored back down the Conwy in tandem. There was photographing on both yachts.
Icarus took this photo while we were anchored, trying to fix the problem:
I took this one as we motored back down the Conwy:
A little further down river we saw a couple getting married on the beach:
When we got back to the marina the log said we had covered 45nm. It was a long day’s sailing, we were out on the water from 10.30 – 20.20. We saw hundreds of seals, and we had a significant issue (which we fixed, but we still don’t know precisely how we fixed it).
When I have the boat lifted out (November?), I’ll look at fitting some kind of a strainer over the cooling intake.