David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Monday, December 20, 2010
Location: George Town, Exumas, Bahamas
Coordinates: 23° 30.730′ N  75° 44.629′ W

We were making excellent progress toward Puerto Rico, and then came last night’s 7pm engine room check: A small pool of oil had accumulated under the starboard side of the main engine. Further investigation revealed that a small oil line had developed a crack. Rats!

I cleaned things up, placed a 1-quart container below the leak to capture the dripping oil, and set my watch timer for 30 minutes. I needed to figure out how much oil we were losing per hour. Could we make it through the night without adding oil to the engine? Was it leaking so badly that we would have to find a place to stop quickly? What were our options if it went from a small drip to a catastrophic failure?

We were cruising south on Exuma Sound at the time, and we were about twelve hours from George Town. My timed oil measurement indicated that we would lose about one quart of oil during that twelve-hour period. Since we don’t have a spare for this hose on board (more on this below), we decided to continue on to George Town. We arrived here this morning, and we are now waiting for the hose to be flown in from Florida. The guys at Yacht Tech are putting the hose on a courier to Fort Lauderdale Airport, where it will catch a flight to George Town tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 7am. They are also sending a roll of “self amalgamating tape”, which can be used to fix minor hose leaks like ours. With a little luck we will have our package by noon tomorrow, and we’ll be on our way again by late afternoon. Fingers crossed! And we owe Yacht Tech another big cruiser “Thank you!” for always being there for us — what an amazing team!

Shortly before we finished up our maintenance work at Yacht Tech on Friday, James Knight (the guru of all things Nordhavn and the owner of Yacht Tech) talked with me about carrying some spare hoses for our main engine. He said that there have been some failures, and it would be a good idea to consider stocking some or all of these hoses as on-board spares. Obviously his comments were prescient, and I should have taken heed. But also being keenly aware that our rising maintenance and repair costs — remember the unexpected cutlass bearing replacement? — I decided to put off stocking these spares until we were ready to cross the Pacific. *sigh* Now this $50 hose will cost us about $250 and a 1-1/2 day delay. Lesson learned.

In the mean time we are anchored in almost exactly the same place we anchored two years ago when we visited George Town for the first time. The Bahamian water is just as blue and beautiful as ever, and we are trying to enjoy our 1-1/2 day break in the voyage — ridiculously difficult for a goal-oriented type-A personality like me!  🙂  I think a swim in the beautiful blue water will help me enjoy the time, and I suspect a rum drink at sunset will also soften the edges.