First of all, huge kudos to Aramis and Marc for having the guts to come offshore with us on the first trip with that new engine! Fortunately, the sail south from Fort Myers Beach was calm and easy as expected, so I think ya’ll were good luck. We needed to get some high-rpm hours on that new Yanmar 3YM anyway, so when what little wind we had to start left us after about 15 hours or so, it was a welcome feeling to hear the smooth tune of the new diesel rumbling below…
And she ran like a charm. And so did the crew, because at one point, ehm ehm, Adam CAUGHT A FRIGGIN FISH!!
That fantastically unfrozen, exceptionally raw, especially deliciously fishy fresh fish was a Spanish mackerel somewhere between 16 inches and 75 feet long. We ate some of it totally raw, and Pablo cooked up some scratch-breaded cast-iron fried fish bits and we all feasted like royalty.
When we caught first sight of the northwest corner of Paradise, the sun was high and the water was clear. Mother Nature rolled out her royal red crystal blue carpet for us and the five of us trotted in on Contigo like conquerers. We’d just made a quick-n-easy passage in near nonexistent weather and nothing could go wrong because we were here and it was friggin’ B-E-A-utiful!
The first day we snorkeled around our new anchorage just NW of Christmas Tree/Wisteria Island, which proved to be a great little spot for a few vagabonds on the hook like us.
That first night we dined at Caroline’s, smoked a fresh Cuban’s cigar… not a cigar from Cuba, but a real live Cuban rolled it!…
… and we partied our minds away at Ricks and Coyote Ugly and Sloppy Joe’s and Irish Kevin’s and just about everywhere we could manage. We didn’t discover the Green Parrot till later, but that totally became my favorite place.
The next day, we tried to start the engine. The starter clicked, and the starting mechanism turned just enough to make the sound of a muffled dumbbell crashing into a concrete slab and bouncing back up to slap us across the face. There was zero movement. I jumped down to check the oil and found this…
Thats water in the oil, which means at least one of a few different things. For us it was one thing specifically: our brand new Yanmar 3YM30 with just over thirty hours on it, was hyrdolocked.
Crash Course on Hydrolocked Diesels!
*** Hydrolocking a marine diesel is what happens when the “wet exhaust” system, which circulates seawater in and out of whats essentially an enclosed radiator called a “heat exchanger” in an effort to circulate heat out of the engine by pumping this warmed sea water out through the exhaust at the back of the boat, messes up by siphoning water back into the engine because the engine is below the water line. What happens: water gets stuck in the cylinders and can’t compress and ignite like diesel fuel, so the cylinder can’t move and “hydrolocks,” preventing the entire system from turning and keeping that starter from starting the engine. Needless to say, saltwater inside an engine can be devastating if not addressed quickly, and thats only if you’re lucky enough that there wasn’t serious damage already done***
The next day we lost Aramis to the real world, but our other stowaway Marc had one more night and it was his birthday. We went out around 10:30pm to party like rockstar sailors, and returned by dinghy around 3:30am to find…
nothing.
Contigo was gone. Seriously, totally, completely, no-kidding-holy-crap-I’m-about-to-have-a-panic-attack gone. If this entry wasn’t already getting long I’d spend a paragraph or two colorfully painting how terrifying and debilitating it was knowing Contigo, our salty chariot, our protector, our floating fortress and humble home, was just…
gone.
After searching in vain within a 200+ yard radius of pitch black anchorage we’d just started getting to know, we asked the neighbors and they said they might have heard what sounded like someone ruffling sails and trying to move it (their implication). We sped back and I contacted the local police and Coast Guard. After a tedious few hours of police reports, we found ourselves waking up in the parking lot at dawn.
One of the officers had suggested a bored, cold hearted, vile, bastard of a local living on one of the floating dumpsters in that area might have just moved it. Apparently, its sort of a “thing” for locals to toy with tourists who anchor in the “locals” spot just north of Christmas Tree Island.
He was right. At dawn I took the dink to the anchorage and found Contigo, rashly anchored and almost aground, on the SE end of the island. It had been a calm night and there were far too many obstacles for her to have dragged anchor and ended up there.
Someone screwed with my boat, and they don’t ever want to meet me. The damned thing couldn’t start anyway… ok I’m getting a bit excited I need to chillax…
Back to figuring out that hydrolocked engine….
After a nail-biting hour or so with the local Yanmar mechanic clearing water out of the engine and explaining what we need to do next, a few trials testing cooling water and compression pressure, incessantly checking oil levels and purity, changing the oil a zillion times, cleaning the valve cover, swapping out the oil pressure sending unit, and ensuring the engine was circulating sea water correctly, plus (especially this one) adding an anti-siphon loop to prevent this problem from happening again, we were again good to go.
Whew.
Brand new Yanmar catastrophe: averted. Lost Contigo: Found. It was already a wild ride in Key West, but we need to get back to partying.
It just so happens that the next friend of ours to visit us, one Casey Clarke, is on deck for a friggin great guest entry coming up next…
