The stars had all aligned such that I had no in-town commitments and the weather was predicted to be sunny, warm & calm, all on the same day. My friend had lent me some of his "mondo condo" shrimp pots and I was eager to give them a try. My plan was to head up into Carroll Inlet and drop the shrimp pots, and then to proceed up to Shelter Cove and drop the crab pots there. I have always done well on crabs at Shelter Cove.
I pulled out in the dark at about 5:30 AM and slowly made my way through town on GPS and radar. When I got to the Mountain Point area it had started to get light and the fog had cleared somewhat. Things were looking up...
At about 7:05 AM I got an engine alarm. It took me a minute to identify the source of the alarm, the starboard engine temperature gauge was pegged all the way to the max. I have almost 4000 hours on these engines, and I've never had an overheat situation. I immediately shutdown the engine.
I got my knee pads on and went down into the engine room. It looked like someone had taken a garden hose and sprayed pink engine coolant all over the engine room. The starboard engine was steaming.
I still had cell phone service, so I called the mechanic who had recently been working on that engine. He advised me to let the engine cool down and then refill it with coolant so I could fire it up again to make my way back to town. I was uncomfortable with that plan, and I decided to leave it down and go back to town on my port engine only.
By now the fog had returned with a vengeance and it was impossible to see anything out the front windows. I have learned through experience that the autopilot does a better job of staying on course in a dense fog than I can do by manually steering, so I engaged the autopilot and headed back to town very slowly, about 3 knots, on the port engine only.
I thought it would be prudent to alert the Coast Guard that was I navigating through the very dense fog on 1 engine only and therefore had limited maneuverability. I tried making contact with USCG Base Ketchikan, which was only a few miles away, but they did not respond to multiple radio calls. Eventually, after about 20 - 25 minutes of trying, the USCG base out of Juneau responded. That was a little bit concerning that it took them so long to respond. If it had been a more dire emergency their response time delay could have made a difference between life and death.
On the way back to town the Harbormaster called me. The USCG had alerted them to my situation. They offered to let me tie up to one of the slips on the ends of the floats as they might be easier to get into on only 1 engine. I considered it, but in the end decided to make for my own slip. There was not a breath of wind, so conditions were dead calm. It was just the fog that was a weather issue.
I made cell phone contact with one of my buddies and he arranged to come down there to help me get into the slip.
When I came into the harbor and headed down the fairway to my slip, I saw my buddy as well as 2 guys from the harbor department there to assist, which was comforting. People may say it's no big deal to get into a slip on 1 engine as many boats do this all the time. But this boat was designed to operate with 2 engines, and it is a wide boat, so the props are quite far apart. It's difficult to maneuver on only 1 engine in tight spaces.
With the help of those on the dock I made it into the slip safely.
Here is my track of this aborted trip to nowhere.
I bought this boat new in mid-2007. They sell this boat with several different engine configuration options, so you can get it with a single larger engine. I chose to get the twin engine configuration for a couple of primary reasons. First is maneuverability. It is much easier to get into and out of slips, marinas, and fuel docks with twin engines. Second is redundancy. I am no mechanic, and there are darn few problems that I can fix myself while at sea. I figured the likelihood of losing both engines at the same time is possible but is pretty low. I know that running twin engines is not as fuel efficient as running a larger single engine, but I'm willing to pay that price for the reliability that comes with having twin engines.
So, to recap it was very disappointing to have to abort the trip and head back to port on such a beautiful weather day. But on the other hand, I got back in safely so it could have been a lot worse.
For those that may be wondering, when the mechanic came down, he quickly diagnosed the source of the problem. When he and his helper last worked on that engine, they had to drain the coolant out in order to replace some hoses and hose clamps. When they put the drain plug back in, they did not seat it down securely enough and when under load the pressure from the engine vibrated the drain plug out and it just blew out onto the engine room floor. In hindsight he said it was a good decision not to refill the coolant and fire up the engine again.
There will be other good weather days coming up this spring and summer and you can bet that I will be out there again as often as I can be.
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