Day 7 - The longest day

 We’re anchored in a magical cove off frying pan bay on the northeast side of Penrose Island. Back into the protected waters of the inside outside passage.  

The day started out so nice, we left port McNeil at about 8:15am after buying some ice and filling up the gas tanks for the skiff and rounded the point, in a foreshadowing of what was to come, with a fog bank off in the distance, calm seas but a long day ahead of us to get around cape caution.  A ranger tug was ahead of us in the channel, just off to the port side, occasionally disappearing in the fog bank, a sublime start to the morning, waiting for Roman to start the morning coffee.  I was surprised to see Graeme Point at the end of Malcom Island and was calling out to show Roman when he popped his head up and shouted “we’ve got smoke in the engine room!”.  I immediately put both engines into neutral and throttled down, adrift in the channel and went down into the salon where the aroma of coolant was overwhelming in the air.  I opened the engine room hatch and expansive clouds of white steam billowed out, filling the cabin.  “Open the windows Patti!”  

I immediately shut the hatch and flipped on the engine room fan toggle to try and vent the steam out.  I waited a few minutes and opened the hatch again and shined a flashlight into the steamy cloudy mist trying to see which engine (or both) had the issue.  Glancing at the engine gauges downstairs, the port engine was showing 240F, about 50F over normal operating temperature so that was my first clue.  After about 10 minutes, the steam had cleared enough for me to get down into the engine room and take a look.  The starboard engine looked fine, no issues other than being covered in coolant “sweat”. The port engine on the other hand…the coolant in the expansion bottle was frothing and boiling and hissing and the radiator cap looked like it was ready to explode. 

You will remember the 3 F’s from day 3 of the blog and this was also something that Benefited from this.  Well the engine ran snd started so fire, was fine, fuel was fine so it was flow.  I started at the raw seawater filter which I had cleaned in the morning in my pre-departure inspection checklist noticing that it was very dirty and clogged and now I noticed that I had neglected to open the sea cock the whole way when I completed the job so the engine had been getting restricted water flow for the seawater cooling and had overheated.  

This is the reason you have a boat with 2 engines even though people say all that extra money for maintenance etc.  We started the starboard engine and decided to head to Port Hardy in case the problem was too big to fix myself.  I left Roman at the helm while I went below to see what I could diagnose and what spares i had on hand.  I was able to quickly diagnose the problem by removing a pipe downstream from the impeller for the raw water pump, no flow meant that the pump wasn’t working.  On the Cummins the raw water pumps are driven by a mechanical cog and wheel system which turns a rubber impeller in a housing, driving the water.  In over heat situations, the rubber impeller in the mechanism can heat up, melt or disintegrate which is what I suspected was the case here.  

I called ahead to a few mechanics in Port Hardy and found one that said he may be able to spare a guy late in the day.  By this point I had located a complete spare raw water pump so I told him I would give it a go and let him know if we needed him.  3.5 hours of challenging work to reach all of the areas I need to get to while bending over a hot engine later and a couple trips to the local marine store I completed the fix and we were underway again, with a 6 hour stretch in front of us to our planned anchorage.  

On the way out of Hardy, changing to course to avoid what we assumed were logs, we came upon a large group of sea otters just hanging out, swimming on their backs.  The wake from the boat didn’t seem to bother them and they actually seemed to enjoy it.  Folks have told us that this is the first time they’ve seen in the otters in about a decade and it’s supposed to be a sign that the ecosystem is recovering. 

As we got into the queen Charlotte straight, you could sense the water change and the big pacific swells started to show up, slow at first but starting to gain in size as we made our way up the straight.  We saw one humpback in the distance but otherwise we were totally on our own, no other boats.  

Rounding cape caution the land started to take on a rugged west coast feeling, like Tofino, with waves crashing against the rocky shores and cascading down sea falls back into the heaving ocean, and green as far as you could see with the majestic coast mountain ranges towering in the distance not unlike the view you get of the Rockies from Calgary, according to Patti. You can see that this is not the same as the areas further south that are protected from the major storms by the bulk of Vancouver island.  Here the passages are exposed to the full brunt of the pacific storms.

The area around the Cape is treacherous with numerous shoals with breaking waves, shallow areas and rocky outcrops and kelp beds to avoid and the tide was a bit rolly with the swells, logs to dodge and the need to change corse often to avoid areas on the chart that looked dodgy. 

We’re all beat but Roman managed to pull off another amazing meal and after a quick round of Banagrams we’re off to bed.

Running time: 8 hours.  Distance covered: 80nm, fuel burned 360L, fuel remaining 1,055L range 25 hours.