July 16, 2004
Northport, MI
Hanging out at Northport Bay Shipyard
Wow! Website traffic is way up! I assume everyone is checking to see what is going on with our engine problems. Here’s the latest:
We are hanging out in Northport, MI. Not a bad place to hang. The town is so small, you can literally walk anywhere in minutes. There is a library, a post office, a store, a restaurant, and an ice cream parlor/pizza place – everything you could want in a town – all in one or two short blocks. The people are super nice. We are happy here. It’s a good thing, as we aren’t going anywhere fast.
Tuesday (13th), we motored the short mile from the Northport Municipal Marina to Northport Bay Boatyard to have their diesel mechanic look at our engine. Our oil pressure problem seemed to vanish. That is always what happens in front of a professional, making me seem crazy (“No, really, there was a problem, honest”). However, Mark, the mechanic/owner, told me he believed me and recommended I change the oil again before we proceeded with any other diagnosis. I started right away. That is when I found the problem.
Changing the oil on a boat’s diesel engine is slightly complicated as you can’t just drive it up on ramps, pull the plug, and drain the oil. You have to go to great lengths, using equipment, and actually pump the oil out of the engine. To sum it up, this implies spending a messy twenty minutes with a hand pump, burning your hands while pumping hot oil through a tube the size of a straw into a milk jug or other container you found somewhere because you don’t have any other container on board just for that purpose. It does not usually involve a lot of swearing, but the job rates down low with scrubbing the soap scum out of the shower pan with a toothbrush or fixing a leaky hose on the head’s holding tank.
This time, the job would prove worth a couple of choice profanities, as what I pumped out of the engine had the color and consistency of chocolate milk. This could only mean one thing, water was in the oil – the evil root of all our oil pressure problems, and much more. This is not new to me. The last engine I had blew a head gasket and suffered the same problem. This time, however, it could be worse as there were compression problems with two of the three cylinders and that could mean other cooling system/cylinder problems – there was no guarantee it was just head gaskets. To date, we have spent very little money on this engine, so now is not the time to start.
This delay will change everything. Our route will change to compensate for our delay to include more canals and more motoring. From here on, we will need reliable propulsion and electrical systems. The options are to spend more time and a lot of money on rebuilding this engine of head-aches and questionable reliability, or we can spend a boat-load of money and re-power with a nice, quiet, clean, new, worry-free, pretty, red engine. The choice is clear. Next week, the shipyard crane will lift our piece-o-crap, old Volvo-Penta out of our boat and we will prepare to receive our brand-spankin’, new Westerbeke 44B-Four diesel, which we’ll install when it arrives in two weeks. From everything I have learned about it, it is a good engine and fully compliant with our Rule #2. It is also very expensive, which means our cruising style will change dramatically – no more staying at high-priced marinas. I think the German cruiser people must have been an omen. From here, we follow their precedent and stay strictly low-rent, dropping the anchor as much as possible, and drinking discount beer (the biggest bummer). But, the piece of mind, reliable performance, and extra power of a new “iron sail” will be more than worth it in the long run – at least that is our justification for going this route. One thing I don’t want to do is spend lots of money and waste hours a day skinning up my knuckles as I wrench away fixing this old engine. I have the knowledge and the ability, but we are here to cruise, not rebuild engines. Give us the new one and we’ll be on our way.
From your side of the screen, this may seem like the beginning of the end for ol’ Nereus and crew. We don’t see it that way. As a matter of fact, the effect is almost the opposite – minus a few thousand dollars. Our Cedar Point deadline is not even an issue anymore – we’ll drive as we can’t make it in time with the boat. This, however, opens everything up for us. Now that we don’t have to be “somewhere,” we can go to all the places we wanted to go, but were planning on missing ’cause of a deadline. We can go on our timeline – Rule #1 eliminated. That means we will hopefully get to see Canada’s North Channel after all. Every one around here keeps telling us we have to go there! Now we can.
Plus, to make up for lost time, we will skip all of Lake Erie, which we never really wanted to visit anyway. Instead, we’re planning to enter the Trent-Severn Waterway from Ontario’s beautiful Georgian Bay and travel across the province (and see some really cool places) to Trenton on Lake Ontario, just east of Toronto. At that point, we should be pretty much back on track, season-wise, arriving at the Erie Canal late August/early September. Perfect.
So, it all works out for the best. Except the money part. But, we have found we don’t much care for marinas anyway and prefer anchoring. We’ll have to make more of an effort from here to watch our spending. It will be very difficult, but we’ll try our best to drink cheeper beer. All this just means we will have to work that much harder when we finally land back on shore and go back to work.
One friend suggested we charge everyone 50 cents for reading this web site. Nice idea, but charging people is not our style. We just ask you remember us at Christmas . . . and Thanksgiving . . . and Holloween. Plus, Steve’s birthday is in September, Vanessa’s in November, Sidonia’s last week, and Jeanie the cat in August, so feel free to send generous cash gifts! . . . or food . . . or better beer!
One thing is for sure, we are still out here and don’t plan on giving up because of this temporary set-back. We are having a great time and are still happy about spending every minute of every day together as a family – we can’t think of a better way to live for now. We are certainly looking forward to getting underway again, as involuntarily sitting in one spot is not much fun, even for a good cause like a new engine.
If you find our self up on the Leelanau Peninsula in the next week or two, stop by and say “Hi.” Until the new engine comes, we have plenty of time to welcome visitors.
-Steve