watches during the daytime. It works like this: Orion (or I) go up
top. Every twenty minutes or so we check the horizon, and now that we
are in the Bahamas, we check for coral heads when it is shallow. We
actually check for coral head every minute, but that is beside the
point. After an hour, we switch. This system works pretty well.
Usually, Dad is in the cockpit as well, and we sometimes play twenty
questions, or something like that. We are both extremely good at it by
now. This passage, being eight hours long (it might have been more) we
used the system the whole time. No complaints. However, the engine
started to overheat. We turned it off, as the sails were out. We
deduced that it was the raw water pump failing in some way, so we
closed the seacock and took apart the water pump. We noticed that
nothing was wrong (by the way, I was on watch this whole time) with
it. So then we put it back together and started the engine. It started
to overheat again, so we turned it off again and then saw that the
seacock was still closed. We opened the seacock, started the engine,
and it ran normally. Odd. Any ideas on how this could have happened?
--By Rigel
OKay here's my two cents. When it was first overheating, something may have been sucked up against the inlet fitting, like some weed, or a flat thing like a plastic bag or some other flotsam, but not fully up into the hose. When you turned off the sea cock the first time, the blockage stuff was loosened by the boats motion and the suction had been relieved by stopping the engine and closing the sea cock. thus it was already clear when you restarted, except for the valve left closed.
ReplyDelete