At night we have our heaviest draw on the batteries because the solar panels are snoozing and we have the auto pilot, chart plotter, radar, AIS, and fridges all running. So we run the diesel generator for an hour or two to charge the batteries enough to carry us through until the sun comes up and the solar panels have had their coffee.
We had run the genny at about 3am but the morning was overcast so we decided to
run it again. It fired up and cut out immediately with error 27 on the display.
“No AC voltage” according to the manual. Second try, same result, so we lifted the
floor to take a closer look.
We both froze. A wave of water surged through the bilge as the boat rolled. We are talking about a serious lake here. It was a third of the way up the generator and
about the same on the main engine. In a boat this size that represents a huge amount
of water. What we couldn’t tell was where it was coming in and how fast. Was the automatic bilge pump running but unable to cope at 1500 gallons/hour, or had it failed at a critical moment?
I flicked on the back up pump, 500 gallons/hour and hoped the circuits hadn’t failed.
I also grabbed the last resort pump handle, popped it into the hand pump mounted in the cockpit floor and started pumping. In the mean time Sandy took a torch and checked every hose and through hull fitting she could find in every locker. No sign of water coming in from any of them. Of course there were some below the water which we couldn’t check unless we could get the water going out faster than it was coming in.
For an eternity it didn’t look like we were gaining on it, and we were mentally going through the contents of the ditch box, what extra food and water we could load into the life raft, we could release the dinghy from the davits and take more stuff… radios, EPIRB, computers, camera etc. With hind sight we were surprisingly lucid in our thinking once we accepted that ditching may actually be a reality. Knowing we would probably have an Aussie Border Patrol plane overhead within hours and the patrol boat from Ashmore Reef in a couple of days was a comfort.
Having said that, we would never ditch unless we were stepping up to the life raft, not down! Too many abandoned boats have been found still afloat after the crew cut loose and were never found.
But eventually we could tell the water level was going down. I stopped the manual pumping for a breather and could check through hulls as they became visible.
All sound.
In Darwin we installed a new 1500 gph primary automatic bilge pump with a float switch. We checked the bilges daily and it was working perfectly.
For those who don’t know boats, there is a stuffing box that the propeller shaft goes through where it passes out through the hull. It has compressible material that keeps the water out, apart from drips needed to keep the stuffing lubricated and cool. As the stuffing wears there are bolts that pull up a collar that adds pressure to the stuffing and
maintains the seal. The water that comes in through the seal is normal and the bilge pump kicks it out when the float switch is activated.
We used the engine a lot in the first 4 days from Darwin and I never realized the water coming in through the stuffing box had increased from drips to a small stream! Because the new pump was working so well the water in the bilge was sitting at the level of the float switch as usual.
When the wind picked up we weren’t using the main engine and the routine bilge check slipped by for a day as we worked with the sails, dealt with the main sail furler failure etc. That of course would be the moment our brand spanking new bilge pump failed.
With the ship back from its near disaster it was a simple matter to tighten up the stuffing box and keep using the back up bilge pump. With no generator we used the main engine to charge the batteries until we dropped anchor here in the Cocos Islands.
Until next
time…