Engine troubles

Our first hiccup of the trip so far. A few days ago Dave did a routine check of our engine water and oil. He noticed it had used some water, but we didn’t think too much of it at the time and just topped it up. The following day he checked it again and found that the coolant level had gone down once more. It wasn’t a huge amount but it was unusual, as before now it has never used any water, so we decided to investigate. That morning Dave spent some time looking around the engine to try to see if the coolant was leaking anywhere without much luck. When we ran the engine, Dave spotted a green plume coming out of our engine exhaust straight away. He turned the engine off and said “we’re going back to Havelock”. Can you guess what was wrong?

An engine on a yacht is like a safety net. About 90% of the time we can sail, but the other 10% we can’t for a variety of reasons. Some of the time there is no wind, at other times the wind is coming from exactly where we want to go, which can be just a hassle or the channel may be too narrow for us to tack our way up wind. It’s in these situations that we’re very glad of our engine. Not to mention that running our engine tops up our batteries, which run all of our electrics including our navigational instruments, anchor windlass, lights and fridge.

Looking down towards Havelock marina

Desolina has a small diesel engine that’s relatively simple and extremely reliable as long as it has fuel, air and doesn’t get too hot. It’s quite similar to a car engine, where there is fresh water, which cycles around the engine to cool it. In a car this water goes through a radiator and air blows past it to cool the water. In a boat engine our radiator (heat exchanger) has salt water pumped through it to cool the fresh water. After the salt water goes through the heat exchanger, it’s squirted into the exhaust box and pushed out along with the exhaust fumes. What Dave saw coming out of the exhaust was the green dye from the antifreeze in our fresh water circuit. This could only mean one thing – that out heat exchanger had a leak. It was a slow leak but it could become a problem if enough coolant leaked out and the engine overheated. It was something we needed to get fixed sooner rather than later.

Our spare heat exchanger

We didn’t want to risk draining all the coolant from the engine and taking it to pieces to try to fix it while we were in the middle of nowhere, so we decided to go back to Havelock Marina to get a boat mechanic to look at it. This was really frustrating for us as we just came from Havelock a week ago and it was in the exact opposite direction from where we wanted to go. We prayed that we could either patch up our heat exchanger or use our rather old looking spare as ordering a new part from Volvo could take a week to get here, plus it would cost us a few dollars and take a sizeable bite out of our savings, thereby shortening our trip.

Since we discovered the engine problem on a Saturday and we couldn’t get a mechanic over the weekend, we slowly made our way into Havelock, sailing as much as possible and running the engine as little as possible.  We also had a couple of cloudy days so our solar panels were not topping up the batteries as much as we would have liked. Without the engine to charge the batteries we were running them quite low and had to conserve power as much as possible.

Dave putting in our spare heat exchanger

We do have to count ourselves lucky though that; we noticed the problem before the engine overheated and caused damage; we were safely on a mooring and not out at sea, and finally, that we were able to put our spare heat exchanger on while we sent the newer one off to be patched up. We’re now setting off to Abel Tasman on our spare heat exchanger, and planning to pick the fixed one back up in Picton in a couple of weeks time.