Publish Date: Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Location: Port Severn, Ontario, Canada
We arrived in Port Severn at southeast corner of Georgian Bay on Sunday afternoon. Port Severn is the western terminus of the Trent-Severn Waterway, which we will traverse over the next couple of weeks to go back to Lake Ontario. To get to Port Severn we had done an overnight passage from Killarney, which went very well: relatively calm seas, and no problems. Or so we thought.
A few hours after we arrived in Port Severn we were giving a engine room tour to some friends, when I noticed some brown stuff in the coolant overflow tank. This was bad. And the worst part was that I immediately knew what it was because there was a discussion about it on the “Nordhavn 43 Owner’s Forum” about a month ago: An O-ring in our transmission heat-exchanger had failed, allowing transmission oil to leak into our coolant system. The discussion on the owner’s forum was about this possibility, and several other owners had experienced the problem. Ordering new O-rings and performing this preventative fix was on my list of “to dos”, but I hadn’t done it yet. Rats!
We immediately began the process of figuring out how bad the problem was, what we needed to do to fix it, and how long the whole thing would take. We had great help from the “Nordhavn 43 Owner’s Forum”, which we read and re-read Sunday evening. On Monday morning we spoke with James Knight at Yacht Tech and Bob Senter at Northern Lights (the builder of our Lugger engine), and we made a plan. We ordered parts (O-rings and a gasket), which were to be shipped overnight from Seattle — with any luck we would have them on Tuesday afternoon. In the mean time we went about cleaning up the oil in the coolant, which appeared to be minimal: It was sitting on the surface of the coolant in the expansion tank, so we were able to “burp” it out by running the engine and expanding coolant out the cap. We may still need a full coolant system flush, so we’ll keep an eye on it over the next couple of weeks to see how it looks.
On Tuesday morning we began the fix to the heat-exchanger. My Dad was visiting from Detroit, so he drove me around to find new coolant, gasket sealer, and a couple of 5-gallon buckets (parents always seem to be there when you need them!). I drained the coolant from the engine, and removed the heat-exchanger. The new parts arrived at 10am, which is pretty impressive given that they had come from Seattle, and they also had to clear Canadian customs. Kathryn and I cleaned up the disassembled heat-exchanger, as well as the oil/coolant debris around the engine. And then we reassembled the heat-exchanger with the new O-rings, and re-attached it to the engine. We also changed the transmission oil while we were at it, just to be sure. We had it all finished and cleaned up by about 3pm on Tuesday, and we started the engine and tested everything. It all looked good.
Before moving on to the “double” part of “double trouble”, I first want to reflect on this fix. I have NEVER done anything like this before, and neither had Kathryn. It was very intimidating disassembling the “heart” of our cruising home, and I wasn’t at all confident in the outcome. But somewhere during the fix — I think when the cleaned-up heat-exchanger parts were laid out on the floor, ready to be re-assembled — I started to feel more comfortable, and more confident. And by the time I was bolting it back onto the engine, I felt like I sort-of knew what I was doing. It was stressful and confidence-building all at the same time, and I’m really glad we did the fix ourselves.
As I was cleaning up the tools and rags from the heat-exchanger fix, I heard Ayla say from the galley, “Dad, I think we’re out of water.” I knew we had plenty of water in the tank, so I thought maybe the fresh-water pump circuit-breaker popped for some reason. But when I checked it, it had not popped. Hmmmmm. I went down into the lazarette, and there was water pouring out of an obviously failing fresh-water pump. Just like normal life, our voyage has both highs and lows; This moment was a definite low! We had just completed a difficult fix, and we were getting ready to shower and go out for a celebration dinner, and now we had another failure. With no fresh-water pump we were pretty much shut down as a home: no dish-washing, toilet flushing, showering, tooth-brushing, hydrating, etc. But worse than all that was the prospect of another fix so close behind the other fix. Sigh.
My Dad is an avid camper, and throughout his life he has owned and maintained a series of campers, trailers, motor-homes, and boats. He took one look at this new problem and said, “This one is a piece of cake!” Within thirty minutes he had me convinced that we could have if fixed by mid-day the next day (assuming we could find a pump locally). Even better, he suggested we jury-rig a hose from the dock to feed our on-board fresh-water system until we could get the fix done. By later in the evening we were flushing toilets and brushing our teeth on the boat with our makeshift water feed. It was a MacGyver-moment for my Dad — well done!
This morning we let our fingers do the walking, and we found a suitable fresh-water pump. Off we went in my Dad’s car to pick it up, and we were working on the fix by 10am. There were a few bumps along the way, but by about 1pm we had a new fresh-water pump installed, and everything seemed to be working again. Yeah! Yippee!
We were two days behind schedule, but the boat seemed to be back in shape. We decided to slip the lines and cruise a little bit, just to feel like we were making some progress. We cruised up the river to the “Big Chute Marine Railway” (which I’ll write about in another blog), where my Dad met us via his car. Kathryn and Ayla cooked a fabulous dinner of Lake Huron whitefish, and all is well once again. Big thanks to my Dad for his help and his wheels — this all would have been much harder without either.
Tomorrow morning we’ll continue our Trent-Severn Waterway adventure across Ontario.
Hi Dave,
First off, good job fixing the problems. Now to my question:
What the heck? All those problems in one day on a new Nordhavn? I’m curious as a future buyer, is this a repair Nordhavn would have fixed if you had the time to wait? More seriously, what would you have done if you were 1000 miles out at sea?
Be safe,
Dan
Hi Dave
I would like to ask the same question as Dan. I would also like to know if Nordhavn have changed the O-ring? As you say, more than one owner has had this problem.
I would also say I have had the same problem on one of my boats. The only problem was I had to bend down over the engine to work on it. It would have been nice to have had a “Proper” engine room like the N43.
Hope all is now well
Be safe, be happy
Mark & Patricia
Good Morning to you all, I live three houses further down north channel from where you had three@sea docked. I am sorry that I did not get to meet you and your family.
I am also a great lakes boater and am theowner of a 46 Azmut and have visited the north channel and have some relitives in Tobamori (Ihope the spelling is right) . One of my reasons for writing is to wish you sailors asafe voyage and perhaps with you having my Email address I can get some updated on you voyage. thanks Tim Henshaw
Hi David,
So sorry to hear about the problems with Three@Sea. I have never engaged in such a large fix but can understand your confidence, pride and satisfaction when completed. Seems like so many projects on the boat start of being intimidating but eventually feel relatively simple once you are knee deep into the repair.
Aren’t MacGyver dads great. Steph’s Dad is our MacGyver with mechanical things. He once temporarily repaired a generator impeller with epoxy glue!
Sounds like the o-ring is a known issue. The water pump is a more perplexing problem. Was it a cracked housing? Perhaps it was simply a poor casting or a combination of misaligned mounting putting stress out the housing? We have only had one pump fail and it was easily repaired with a refurbish kit. Maybe dockside water would be a good upgrade project to have in emergency situations or for when you have good water quality and are on the dock. Perhaps a spare pump is something to have while abroad. I seem to recall that Kosmos had a similar problem in Gibralter.
At least this all happened while in the boating heartland of Ontario. Most things can be found in Southern Ontario and if not with Pearson International Airport can be had relatively quickly as you found out.
I am happy to hear you are on your way once again. Too bad the weather is still dodgy.
Happy locking!
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Dan,
Yes, I had thoughts along these lines as well. Here are my thoughts on these failures:
Our Nordhavn is not a new boat. She is three years old (a 2006 model), and we bought her from the first owner when she was two years old. She is out of warranty with Nordhavn, and many of the individual components on the boat are also now out of warranty. (This is one reason you pay so much more for a new boat.) These boats are very complex, and I think Nordhavn does as good a job as anybody out there ensuring that their boats are built to high quality standards. But they’re not perfect — nothing is. I suspect my acceptance of this reality comes from my career in the enterprise software industry. 🙂
The water pump that failed was a SureFlo pump, which carried a three-year warranty — what a coincidence. I think this is an example of the “disposable culture” that our society has evolved toward. Rather than build a tough, well-engineered, high-quality pump that will last ten years or so, manufacturers try to reduce the price at all costs, often sacrificing durability and quality. It’s an unfortunate reality. Having said that, we had always planned to carry a spare fresh-water pump when we stocked our spares this fall before leaving the country to begin our circumnavigation. Now we’ll have the extra security that our installed pump is quite new, and our spare is brand new as well. Perhaps most important, I now have the experience to change it while cruising abroad.
The problem with the heat-exchanger is a little more frustrating. Apparently the root of the problem is that the heat-exchanger used to sometimes need to be re-oriented on the engine during installation in the boat. When this was done, they probably should have installed new O-rings in the heat exchanger because O-rings are notoriously unreliable when they’ve been compressed, uncompressed, and then re-compressed. When I wrote that this was a “known problem”, what I meant was, for the boats that have the issue, Nordhavn, Northern Lights, and the owners group have all suggested that these O-rings be replaced within 2-3 years of life. If they’re not replaced, then sometime after three years you are more likely to experience the problem. We had planned to replace the O-rings long before we began our circumnavigation this fall — just not soon enough it turns out.
So the bad news for us is that there was a potential problem that bit us. But the GREAT news from my standpoint is that there are more than fifty Nordhavn 43 boats out there, and the collective knowledge is quite extensive. There are a number of these known issues that have come to light because of the experience of these cruisers, and we each knock them down as quickly as we can (one owner compared it to the “whack-a-mole” video game). And those of us who plan to cross an ocean or two try to address everything possible before setting off for the horizon. There will probably still be unexpected problems that occur “out there”, but when that happens I’ll be reassured that we’re part of the Nordhavn community, and we can call somebody on our satellite phone to get some help with the fix or the workaround.
Thanks for your comments and questions. And thanks for following Three@Sea!
David
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