This was a day of motoring. With three bridges where the opening times would need to be met and mostly narrow channels where sailing (with the wind on the nose) was no option (at least not for me, because I was in a hurry). I know this “in-a-hurry” thing is not a good idea at all and totally not part of my plan but there have been weeks of no weather windows for crossing the north sea and there may just be one next week and if I’m not in Lemvig or near Thyboroen before the storm hits I will probably miss it.
So up came the anchor at 8am and off we went. No problems until about halfway when I noticed that no cooling water was coming out of the exhaust. Turned off the engine and the boat around let John (the autopilot) stay in the channel while I frantically started cleaning the seawater filter.
I had had the same thing happen earlier when I was here when a jellyfish got stuck in it.
After that cooling water flowed but only about half the amount. I figured that the impeller must have got hurt in the process and turned the boat around again. The impeller was in mint condition…
I needed to get to my anchorage behind the last bridge which was only 20 miles (about 4-5 hours normally) away but now I could only use the motor at very low revs and we had some current against us.
It took another 10 hours. We entered the anchorage just before dark. I had decided that the problem must be in the heat exchanger stack. But the motor was far too hot now to do anything.
