Publish Date: Friday, August 8, 2008
Coordinates: 27° 12.44′ N 080° 15.77′ W
Well, it’s official: I’m in way over my head! Today, the day before we leave for five straight days at sea, I learned that the oil in our three diesel engines (main engine, generator, and wing engine) had not been changed in about 18 months. Although the engines don’t have very much time on them, old oil is not a good thing, so the prudent thing to do is to change it before we leave. Fortunately, our boat manufacturer installed conveniences to make this a relatively straightforward process. But I haven’t changed oil in any engine since I was a teenager, so I needed a little instruction (and I also needed to suspend any notion that I was going to stay clean today).
First I needed to go buy oil and oil filters. How much oil? Sixteen gallons! That’s not a typo: I needed oil for this oil change, and spare oil for the voyage. Once I got the oil, Mike from the Nordhavn commissioning team was kind enough to come show me how to use the built-in oil change pumps. It’s actually pretty easy once you know how, but we still spent about an hour in a 100-degree engine room getting it done. Now I just need to hope we did everything right because the next time we fire up the main engine it will be running for five days straight!
Shortly after my mechanical tutor left the boat, I was out on the dock cleaning things up when I heard a loud explosion from the boat. “What the heck was that?!”, I said to myself (with a slightly different vocabulary). I scurried into the engine room, expecting to see oil splattered all over everything. Nothing. Then I looked in the lazerette (the storage area under the cockpit) to see if maybe one of my spare bottles of oil exploded. Again, nothing. After about 15 minutes of searching, I finally discovered the culprit: A can of ginger ale had been put in the freezer part of one of our refrigerators the night before, and it had just gotten frozen enough to explode. Whew! It was quite a mess cleaning up the ginger ale, but I was smiling most of the time, happy I hadn’t exploded something in the engine room the night before we went to sea.