It is only ten days until Aliisa comes out of the water for her annual make-up session and I have been worried about getting her up the creek to the boat yard with only a lump of barnacles as a propeller.
Thanks to the my ever supporting and generous boss, Michael at the Great Northern Hotel, I had four days off for taking the boat out to a pre-clean in clear water.
On Saturday morning I'm getting the boat ready for a weekend trip. I decide to turn the engine on. It turns and turns and turns but will not start. I think it's a fuel related problem and start bleeding the fuel system. No improvement. I replace two short pieces of fuel hose and bleed again. The battery is getting tired.
I take a page out of an old newspaper and set it alight. I crawl halfway into the engine room. With one hand only just reaching the ignition key I reach the other hand to push the burning newspaper into the air-intake and turn the key. Before I know I've got a half a meter flame in my hand and I spend the next five minutes putting it off and cleaning the mess.
"Fuck it!" I think and give up. I call Tino (see acknoledgements*) and he suggests I have a problem with the glow plugs. I start pulling them out. They look like shit and the wire connecting them is hardly conductive. It is Saturday afternoon and all the glow plug shops are closed. I solder a new wire. There's nothing more I can do, so I have a can of warm vodka/lemon and go to bed.
An hour later, as it's starting to get dark, I'm waking up from my afternoon nap. I rember that four years ago, when I put new glow plugs in, I kept the old ones. I pull a ton of gear from under the bed and find them. When I finally get the new wiring in place and the new plugs in, I have another go at starting the engine. The voltmeter drops down to 10v when I press the glow plugs on, and when I turn the key the engine fires up.
The next day, Sunday, it takes me six hours to drag the reef growing under my boat to Fitzroy Island, 15 nautical miles away. One scuba tank, and two hours of scraping and the marine life is off the hull. One baby crayfish was left alive but homeless.
I don't know much about glow plugs. Are these fucked? Maybe it was just the wiring? With the old ones back in (the one in the middle) the engine came alive.
