Over the last week or so, we’ve gotten ourselves well in touch with two things that can really slow few sailors down: engine trouble and winter weather fronts.

But before that happened, we took on a fourth passenger for a bit…

When our new friend added a layer of “paint” to the deck, we decided it was time for him to go.

At a quick fuel stop somewhere between somewhere and here, we checked the coolant to find what looked like a layer of mud.

Shit indeed.

We flushed it out, refilled with new coolant, cleaned what had to be a year of janky sea grime from the sea-strainer, and hoped that was the problem.

Moving right along to Morgan City…

By now we’re on a roll. Morgan City’s big wall they like to call a marina is just a pit stop. If we keep it up we’ll be in New Orleans in a few days!

Then, thanks to a rain front, we were stuck in Morgan City just long enough to realize there is absolutely nothing going on in Morgan City. We watched some Mel Gibson movies, drank some $2.50 ‘Weisers with three different guys named Henry at a tiny little spot called the Blowout Bar, had some bangin’ cajun at Rita Mae’s Kitchen, did some laundry, and decided to get the hell outta there the morning the weather cleared. Three nights in Morgan due to weather. What a bummer.

Then all of a sudden, the trusty ol’ 1980 Yanmar 3QM30F threatened to keep us in the stale little town even longer. After an hour of bleeding air out of the fuel lines and chasing phantom leaks, we got her running and skipped out as quick as we could toward Houma.

[It’s not that Morgan City sucks, its just that we wanted to get moving, the weather was bad, and we’d already watched Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, Braveheart, and the Patriot. So it was time.]

On to the next one…

Eight hours in the ICW and we’re in Houma. This stretch of the Ditch was particularly scenic, so I’ll just throw a bunch of pictures at ya for a thousand words each.

Before we left Corpus, we changed all fluids and filters, so I was already surprised about the mud in the coolant. When we checked the oil in Houma, we found what had to be a decade of sludge we must have knocked off in the last 130 or so hours we’d been running that engine this trip. Its not as though she’d been sitting unused in the two years I’ve owned Contigo, but we’d never run the engine for more than a few hours at a time. Maybe 15 hours once or twice, but never 130+ hard hours in two weeks like we have now in the ICW.

We changed the oil, ran her hard for a few hours, and changed it again. The brand new oil we’d just put in turned almost as black as the old stuff, but not nearly as gunky. I guess she’s just clearing her throat, because the following oil change we put in hasn’t looked nearly as bad.

Naturally, we had to put the oil in something.

Even after changing the oil twice, changing and flushing out the coolant, and cleaning out the sea-strainer, we were still having trouble staring the engine after she’d been sitting for a night. A few Irish coffees/beers/NFL games later, we’d found a leak just on the back of the fuel filter. By some stroke of dumb luck, taking the thing apart and putting it back together seems to have fixed that leak.

Well, at least that particular leak…

Now we see what looks like another leak coming out of the fuel injector pump on one of the metal lines running to a cylinder. Luckily, when we can get two cylinders going the third is never far behind.

Now all we need to do is fix the injector pump and we’re probably most likely hopefully back to good on that engine!

On to New Orleans!!