Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Motor repair while sailing

Red rocks at Stegskär
Stegskär in the evening
Flies everywhere, so disgusting
Möholm

Rödhamn labyrinth

Rödhamn harbour master and café

Lunch at Rödhamn

Rödhamn

Old impeller

As usual we woke up early, but that we could have breakfast just in our T-shirt and shorts is amazing! Well this heat wave will last until Friday, when my next crew arrives Saturday temperatures will drop and weather is predicted to become more unstable after that.
Our plan was to make a lunch stop at Rödhamn which apparently is popular among Swedish sailors as a first harbour after crossing over to Åland.
Yesterday I came up with the idea that the seawater cooling system for the motor must have a filter that needs cleaning after all the algea in the water. So at the harbour I pulled out the Volvo Penta motor instructions and found out where and how to clean the filter.
Today suddenly after sailing most of the way just before reaching Rödhamn suddenly the oil overheating alarm went off! I always check if water comes out the cooling system for the motor when I turn it on and when the alarm went off that was what I checked first: No water!
Quickly and Thanya was a champion we set the front sail and I turned the motor off.
Now my boat motor course and book came in handy knowing that the first thing to be replaced is the impeller, we had 3 spare parts on the boat.
We set Alfons to steer the boat while I got my instruction books, toolbox and spare parts out. It took me about 30 minutes to exchange the impeller,  but then still no water came out. After trying to fill water into the filter I had cleaned yesterday evening, it dawned on me. Today I had closed the sea valve before changing the impeller, but yesterday working with the filter no such instructions had been asked of me,  but probably I should have. My assumption was I had drained the seawater out of the cooling system by not closing the valve so now I needed to fill it again somehow. After some tries and a lot of bottle sea water I got the cooling circulation of sea water working again. Without my course I would have been lost!
In the meantime the wind had died down completely and we finally motored towards Rödhamn for lunch. Still all sweaty from working with the hot motor suddenly a swarm of small flies "attacked" forcing me to put my hand in front of both my mouth and nose to not breath them all in: GROSE!
10 Minutes later at the harbour they were gone, so strange!
Now we had a great lunch Thanya first skeptical about smoked salmon ate her whole bit, because it was so tasty.
After resting and regrouping we continued with our original plan to go on to a natural harbour for the night. Wind had picked up again so we had another 2 hours of great sailing arriving at my first Åland harbour from over 2 weeks ago again: Stegskär! This time I did not park between rocks we choose to swing anchor.
Right now we are enjoying the evening sun after dinner and swimming. Life is awesome!

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