Jonathan says Warsash, midnight! The phone rang. ‘Sea Start. How can I help?’ ‘My engine keeps cutting out. There’s no wind at all, it’s completely died off and I am motoring. But the engine keeps cutting out.’ ‘OK, I’m coming. Where are you?’ ‘Biscay.’ ‘BISCAY! The Bay of Biscay?’ ‘Yes, I’m calling you on my satphone.’ ‘Right. Well obviously, I’m not coming. Can you tell me what it’s doing?’ ‘Well it keeps petering out. It’ll go for a couple of minutes and then cut out and then I give it a few minutes and it’ll start up and then peter out again after another couple of minutes.’ ‘It sounds like a fuel problem.’ ‘Yes, I am sure it is but I just don’t know what to do. I’m an accountant not an engineer. I haven’t a clue when it comes to engines.’ At which point the satphone went dead. He called back five minutes later. This cutting out of the satphone went on for the next two and a half hours, during which time I got the chap to change both fuel filters, clean the fuel line out to the fuel tank, which is where the blockage was, and get the engine running again to get himself to shore in northern Spain. I asked him a few questions about the engine, did it have a such and such here or a pipe there? I was pretty sure he was looking at a Volvo MD21B. I pictured the engine in my mind and then took him through everything step by step. I’d ask him to describe the fuel filter and then I’d know what I was dealing with and could tell him exactly what to do, even to the point of taking a pipe off and blowing back into the fuel tank to try and clear the blockage on the assumption that this was the problem and would buy him some time to get to the shore. ‘The fuel filter is a round filter, by the front of the engine up high on the left. Follow the pipe down from
there and you come to the lift pump on the engine, now follow that to another pipe that comes down from the pre-filter on the bulkhead. That’s the one that will block up if there is a blockage and is it a rubber pipe?’ ‘No, it’s a copper pipe.’ ‘With small metal clips?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ‘They’re jubilee clips. You need to take this apart. Have you got something to drain the fuel into?’ ‘Yes, I’ve got something.’ ‘Well put that underneath, now there’s a drain on the bottom. Can you feel it?’ ‘Er … yes, yes I can feel it.’ ‘Well drain that out.’ …and then the phone would cut out. Then five minutes later he’d call back. This continued for some time until he reached the filter in the fuel line. ‘Now, is there any dirt on the filter?’ ‘Well, it’s not that bad.’ ‘Then there must be a blockage in the fuel line, the line from the fuel tank to that filter, so undo the jubilee clip attaching the line to the filter. Now, blow down it and if you can feel a restriction just see if you can clear it.’ So he went off to do that and came back. ‘Yes, it was quite hard and then suddenly it came free and I could hear the air in the fuel tank.’ ‘Great, you’ve unblocked it.’ And then he put it all back together again. ‘Make sure you put the seals in right – they are a pain in the arse. Right, now you’ve got to bleed the engine. You need to undo the bleed screw, not the bolt that is in the centre of the engine; undo that and the whole thing will fall to pieces…’ And when we had finished and the engine was running smoothly once more, he was on top of the world. As pleased as punch with what he had been able to achieve. Starting off knowing nothing, he had been able to fix the problem. It would have taken the rescue services many hours to find him. It was fortunate that he had a satphone and thought of calling Sea Start. I discovered later that he had had to repeat this process a further three times before he made harbour.
Preface
Engine maintenance.indb 9
9
02/03/2022 19:03
