Well, officially we have the new stuff installed. We are just waiting for some sealant to dry a bit more before we fire up the engine and test everything out. After pondering everything, we think we know what happened.
Back in 2004 or 5 when we replaced the engine, the shipyard built a fiberglass tube to go the fairly long horizontal distance from the engine room over the top of the counter and under our cabinets. We are pretty sure they used a piece of PVC pipe and wrapped it with fiberglass to make the fiberglass tube. We all know PVC pipe gets pretty soft when it gets hot and we think when we were having our overheating problems before we left Sitka, it probably deformed a bit and broke free of the fiberglass. It probably even got misshaped a bit and started letting the cooling water get away from the hot exhaust gasses and thus allowing itself to further deform and move down the line to the elbow which eventually blocked everything off. The nearly 300 hours of motoring we did from Alaska slowly did their magic. It is a miracle the exhaust water didn’t back up and hydro lock the engine. When we got the hose off the piece of PVC was all twisted and melted together. We are sorry but we didn’t get a picture of this. In any event this all happened just after Cape Mendocino, which is a place that is famous for having to watch out for bad weather. We didn’t want to be stuck here just bobbing around helplessly waiting for the weather to get bad so we desperately tried to figure out a method to make repairs so we could get a working engine again. One of the hoses between the mixer riser and the fiberglass tube was also very damaged. The inner hose and outer liner had separated and the exhaust gasses had softened it enough that if we tried we could poke a hole through the hose with our finger and we needed to rescue this hose. We flopped the hose around and put the very soft parts over the fiberglass tube. We then tightened up the hose by tightly wrapping it with electrical tape, then a couple of layers of heat shrink tape that we had left over from when we put the winter enclosure on Sari Timur. This and some carefully placed hose clamps got us working again. We motored at low revs for 36 hours until we got into Half Moon Bay as we didn’t dare to turn off the engine and restart in case we caused something to blow.
Being in Half Moon Bay allowed us to order the correct stuff. We now have a new Vetus Hydrolock and the hoses are hardwall exhaust hoses. So there is no need for a fiberglass tube. Everything had to come from the East Coast so we only received it yesterday.
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| The old hydrolock with splash zone repair |
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| New Hydrolock installed |
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| The fiberglass tube |
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| The elbow |
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| The old tube and hoses out for replacement |
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| The damaged hose |
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