Charity Day Sail

Each year, as part of a fundraising effort for disadvantaged Federal Way public school students which was started by Mandy's team when she was with Americorps in that district, we auction off a day sail on the boat. This year, we were just leaving on our trip north when they had the auction so we didn't actually attend, but still offered up the trip, planning to take whoever won out sometime after we got back.

Needless to say, our ability to honor our end of the bargain was called into question a few times during the travails of the trip, but once we got the boat back to Port Townsend intact and convinced ourselves it wouldn't sink out from under the hapless auction winners, we contacted them and scheduled the day sail for this weekend. Although only a six hour event for the winners, it was going to be a full-on three day weekend for Mandy and me, since we had to go up to Port Townsend, get the boat and sail it down to Seattle, take the lubbers out, and then sail it back up to Port Townsend where it will eventually be hauled out for the winter. After everything else we've been through, this all seemed more of a nuisance than anything, and I was looking forward to getting it over with.

We drove up to Port Townsend on Friday morning and found that the boat was still in good shape and ready to go. She caught a little bit when I cranked up her Yanmar 2QM20 diesel engine, but I put it down to low charge on the starting battery (which isn't attached to the solar charging circuit, both to safeguard it from any trouble with that system and to shepherd the solar power for the house batteries) which had been sitting unused for a few weeks. At any rate, we didn't use the engine much, only motoring for about fifteen minutes to get through the Port Townsend canal between Indian Island and the mainland. After that, we raised sail and beat south in moderate winds toward Seattle.

Our troubles started when we went to start the engine again for the final stretch into town. After clicking a couple of times and barely turning over, the engine wouldn't start. I left Mandy sailing south in a breeze which was shifting to northerly and went below to troubleshoot.

My first thought was again the batteries, but the multi-meter showed a pretty good charge on all of them and I tried every combination of the two banks with no result. The starter solenoid would click, but other than the occasional fitful jerk, it wouldn't turn over the engine. I tried jumping across the contacts to hotwire it with the same result. After consulting Nigel and my Yanmar manual, and having run through their various steps to isolate starting problems, I concluded that the starter itself was busted. That was about the extent of my capabilities, however--I didn't feel capable of taking it apart and trying to diagnose or repair it. So, I unearthed our recently re-discovered manual crank and tried that on.

There was nothing doing with that beast, however--I couldn't get it to crank through a single cylinder compression, even putting all my weight and effort on it, and although the engine has a decompression lever which allows the flywheel to be spun up freely before engaging, there simply was not enough room in the engine compartment to spin the crank through a full revolution. Without that, there was no way to get it spinning regularly and no way to get the engine to turn over.

Although the wind had shifted and died off a bit, there was just enough to keep us going on the flood current as far as Shilshole Marina, who we called up and got a slip assignment from for the night. There was a cloud of other boats heading in for the evening as we got there at just about nightfall, but fortunately they all maneuvered around us, not without a few dirty looks, as we ghosted tentatively in behind the breakwater on a fickle breeze. We managed to get into the slip (a shoreside one, no less) without too much trouble and went to bed.

The next morning was pretty miserable. We called to cancel the sail, but the people, who it turned out Mandy had known in her previous job, wanted to come down and see the boat and visit anyway, and since that was the least we could do, we said okay. I also called my friend Don, and we concocted some scheme to construct a fitting out of a hole saw and use his high-torque drill to try and manually crank the engine. It being a Saturday, I had little hope of finding a replacement starter, particularly since Yanmar guards their parts distribution network like Fort Knox and there are few dealers in Seattle in the first place. The ones I knew of were all closed on weekends. Both Mandy and I had to be back in town by Monday morning for business reasons. So, our only hope was to either leave soon and sail the whole way up (leaving soon because the winds may or may not cooperate--the more time you give yourself in such a situation, the better your chances of catching a fair breeze) or get the thing started manually. Since the forecast didn't hold much hope for wind, I pegged my hopes on a manual start.

Don's hole saw blade was about the right size to fit over the manual crank head, but the round file he had brought to notch it to match the fitting was hardly adequate to the task of cutting the hard steel of the blade. Fortunately, another friend, Tory, had just moved to Ballard (the neighborhood Shilshole is in) and was both awake and in possession of an angle grinder which he was happy to lend us. The grinder had the blade notched out in no time.

Unfortunately, "high-torque" wasn't high enough to compress the engine. We did manage to get it spinning pretty good with the compression release set, but as soon as it engaged and tried to actually crank a cylinder, it went nowhere. It took both Don and I to hang on to the drill, but nonetheless the drill didn't have enough smack to turn the engine over.

The other alternative, letting the boat sit at Shilshole for a week, didn't appeal to my pocketbook; and there was no guarantee that come Monday, any of the Yanmar dealers would actually have the part in stock. Delivery could take the whole week or more.

Another friend of ours, Stan, did some Internet detective work for us and came up with a Hitachi part number for an equivalent starter (later, I discovered our original is a Hitachi OEM which Yanmar buys) and I figured there might be some hope of finding one of those in a mass-market auto parts shop, or one of the local chandleries. I called a few auto parts places with no luck, and then tried Fisheries Supply, but no one there could be bothered to look up the part number for me to see if they stocked it.

There is a West Marine store up the block from the marina; it's the smaller of the two in Seattle, and although West Marine doesn't carry many engine parts, I had plenty of time to wander up there on a blind chance and figured they could call the larger store to see if they had anything. Don and I walked up there while Mandy entertained our recently arrived guests. We had brought plenty of food, so the least we could do was try to shove as much of it at them as possible while they were around.

West Marine didn't carry anything of the sort, as expected. However, there is a small marine consignment store next door, and since we were already there, we decided it couldn't hurt to take a look. I had never seen many engine parts there, either, but I thought maybe the guy who managed it might know of some marine diesel shop open on a Saturday. At that point, I was very much prepared to walk back, suffer through some interminable agonizing while smiling and visiting with our disappointed guests, and then try to warp the boat out to the end of the dock and catch enough breeze to hopefully clear the breakwater and then sail/drift north for the next couple of days, or until we absolutely had to call Vessel Assist. A tow would have been unthinkably expensive, but I was absolutely out of cheap options.

So my mood was dark walking into the consignment shop, and when I walked into the dim corner where their few engine parts are it didn't improve--absolutely everything they had was on a rather barren looking set of metal shelves tucked into a corner, and there wasn't much there at all. Most of it was alternators, but on the bottom shelf there were two starters. And one of them was an obnoxious looking black monstrosity clearly marked "Yanmar" and "Hitachi" which was an almost exact match for the one bolted on the side of our engine.

I couldn't believe my good fortune, and carting it back to the boat I had just about convinced myself that it wasn't the match that it looked like, or that it would be broken somehow as well, or that I would break something else getting the old one out of the cramped quarters it was installed in.

But getting the old one off was a matter of unhooking a few wires and taking out two bolts, none of which stuck or fell in the bilge, and the old one slid right in, a perfect fit. The only difference whatsoever was in one of the electrical connectors; as luck would have it, I didn't have any spares for that gauge of wire, so we had to run back up to West Marine for one, but as soon as the thing was hooked up, it turned right over and the engine fired right up.

Since the people were still there, we got to take them out for a somewhat shortened sail after all, which made us feel tremendously better... and it turned out to be a lovely summer day, light breezes, the Blue Angels arcing about over Lake Washington nearby, and light boat traffic.

We dropped them back off late in the afternoon and decided to head all the way back to Port Townsend that night. Apart from some quirky behavior out of the autopilot around Point No Point, it was a smooth trip back, and we got back on the buoy at my folk's place around 2300 and spent the night on the boat.

We had an easy time securing it again in the morning and getting packed up, and after a hearty blueberry pancake breakfast ashore, we drove back to Seattle with a huge weight off our chest.