Echo Bay Deux

By my count, this is the second Echo Bay we have been in on this trip. I'm not counting too closely, though; there are Echo Bays all over the place, and who is to say that we haven't been by, in, or through several others along the way?

This particular Echo Bay is a well-known and well-liked marina in the Broughton Islands near the north tip of Vancouver Island. It's so well-liked that reservations are recommended. I don't think we needed any today (well, we didn't make them, and we're here, so I guess we didn't need them) but we spent the night nearby in Waddington Bay and got here early, just in case. It's Texas BBQ Night, one of many organized events here, and not the sort of thing you want to be late for.

We had planned to stop anyway, but we had some problems with the diesel yesterday that made us want to get to someplace with communications and, if necessary, float plane service before we dug into them. I don't recall if I mentioned it before or not, but we experienced a brief power drop a few days ago coming off Johnstone Strait where the engine would, without either of us touching the throttle, rev down about 500 RPMs or so.

Yesterday, it went even lower, and died a couple times. I can't be sure as to the cause, but one of the likely suspects is clogged filters, so we stopped here to change them.

Change them we did, but not without much difficulty. Whoever put the primary filter on last time around (we haven't changed them since we got the boat; haven't racked up that many engine hours) was a gorilla. My strap wrench is for our oil filter (come to think of it, the same guy must have put that on... that's why I had to buy the wrench in the first place) and is too small to fit around the big Racor filter element.

We jury-rigged something with a nylon strap, non-skid, a crescent wrench, and a pair of needle-nose pliers which finally managed to get the thing off... and put a big dent in it at that.

As is recommended, we put the new one on only hand-tight.

Someone installed an electric bypass pump in the fuel feed line, presumably for bleeding the engine, and that was what we used it for, apparently successfully, as it then started and ran for fifteen minutes without hiccuping.

Of course, it's going to work at the dock. Only time will tell if we've addressed the ultimate problem.

I'm also not sure if we simply hadn't been letting it warm up enough; we'll be doing that more religiously in the future also. If that's what the problem was, it speaks to deeper troubles, with pistons and such, but while they are more serious and more expensive, they are less urgent. If that's the case, we can finish the summer out without doing substantially more damage.

Or maybe it was just air in the line. If so, that will hopefully have been solved by our bleeding the system today (unless we didn't find the point of the leak; but there were no obvious drips, drops, or bubbles after we sealed everything up).

Anyway, it's almost BBQ time, I'd better go. After fighting with the engine most of the day, I've got quite an appetite built up.