My turn? (Grin)
It's Friday afternoon. You fire up both engines on an ancient wooden 80 foot
trawler, and
head out on a falling tide on the way to Oriental, NC via
Adams Creek. (ICW) You back out of the slip with both engines in reverse, and slide out into the cove on your way to the
ICW. When you clear the pilings you put cut the
wheel over and put both engines in forward... except only the port
engine goes into
gear.
Wind is such that you cannot get back into the slip at with one
engine, and a sandbar prevents you from turning out to the channel with your port engine in forward. A small
fishing skiff putters by you, between you and the pilings in the only dredged area of the cove as you are being blown towards the sandbar. After sweating bullets balancing the crushing of the skiff and maintaining steerage to avoid taking off the bow of a new Hatteras. Distant third is keeping the
boat off the bottom. You make it out to the turning basin. Deciding what to do you proceed with only the port engine.
You make it under the
Morehead City Causeway bridge skirting sideways in the chop
current one way,
wind going the other while getting passed by expensive looking sport
fishing boats. You get out to the
ICW, your crew runs up and says the engine room is full of steam, the port engine is
overheating. On the port engine, you are making 4 knots. No sooner than your crew says this, the coastguard issues a small craft advisory over the
VHF... for the Neuse river and an impending thunderstorm.
Your engines: Two Cummins diesels, with heat exchangers. Your controls are cable operated Morse MT3 shifters. Your
cables are intact, the controls shift perfectly on the port engine... but only neutral and reverse on the starboard, which feel the same as always. The Starboard shifter will simply not move into forward, and does not click into
gear.
What do you do to get into the next
dock capable of handling your boat? Just happens to be a boatyard, it is Friday afternoon and the only hope for having whatever
parts you might need over the weekend. Only problem? It's 12 miles away, and you have to get there without melting down the port engine.
You are at the
helm and you have one other crew. Just to add to the riddle, your
windlass is non-operational. Yesterday the back half of the
windlass started lifting off the
deck from the tug of the
dock lines. You scraped the
paint out of the anchor lockers man hole cover, and knocked it loose with a breaker bar. You pull out the pieces of what used to be the anchor chain from the locker in awe. The only anchor you have is a bent 15 pound danforth kedge with a few feet of chain and a hundred feet of 3/8ths nylon. (See the skit of “The front fell off…” you grab a few handfuls of dusty frames and avoid getting stabbed by the
bronze screws… as you scurry back out of the hole.)
What was the problem with the starboard gear? How do you lock it into forward, and what was the fix that brought the shifter back to life (After you make it to the dock...
) No tools required for this fix.
What was the problem with the port engine, and how do you limp along to make it to the dock before the thunderstorm starts, without it melting down? You will need it to dock so it must not blow!
(True story! A harrowing adventure of not knowing what the heck your doing... Beginners luck.
)