JELLY FISH, by Bob

It was time for a haircut.  I have cut my own hair for the past 25 years or so and it is generally a pretty routine type of job, but it is a little more involved when you live on a boat.

So we are tied to a private dock in Norway and we are prepping to leave the boat for a week to go on a road trip to visit some friends that don’t live so near the water.  It’s a cold rainy evening.  We have the cockpit bubble up and the heater is on.  I have pre-charged the hair clippers and decide we should run the engine both to top up the batteries and to make some hot water so that I can take a “cockpit shower” after my haircut.

The engine is rumbling away and things are proceeding well.  I am about three quarters of the way through my haircut when a high pitched alarm sounds.  This is one we haven’t heard before and creates quite a family response.   It is coming from the control panel for the engine in the cockpit.  I am a bit slow getting out of the head where I am cutting my hair so Kim is hollering what she is finding.  I make sure she notes what indicator light is on before I let her shut the engine off.

The engine is overheating…it’s never done this before.  This probably means that something has clogged the raw water part of the cooling system.  Basically there is a hole in the side of the boat where water is pumped in by the engine which cools a separate loop of antifreeze which in turn cools the engine.  This water then passes out with the exhaust.  The incoming water goes through a large particle filter in the engine room.  So the first thing I do is check that.  I unscrewed the cap and tried to pull the filter out.  It had such an airlock that I could barely remove it.  It was completely filled by some sort of off-white jelly like substance…A Jelly Fish for sure, the harbor here is full of them!  I cleaned out the filter and used a small piece of hose to siphon out the rest of the guts from the filter housing.

A basketball-sized jelly fish

I finished my haircut and was very fortunate to have enough warm water to have my shower.



The next morning before we left on our road trip I topped up the coolant and started the engine to see if it would pump water.  It did so we went on our road trip.  I thought all that week that I had better check and change the raw water pump before we cross the North Sea. 



A week later, the day we were to leave Norway, I took the pump housing apart and found that the pump had, in-fact, failed.  Two of the rubber vanes were broken off and lodged somewhere in the cooling system.   These need to be retrieved or they can impede the flow of cooling water.  I was very fortunate to find the first piece in the hose that leads to the heat exchanger but there was still another piece to be found.  My father and I had taken the heat exchanger apart for cleaning in Vero Beach, Florida, before we crossed the Gulf Stream.   It is a fairly involved process and I was not too excited about doing it again so soon.  I had our little wet dry vacuum from Walmart out so I thought it would be worth a try to see if I could suck it out of the exchanger.  It worked!  All broken pieces accounted for and new pump installed in less than an hour; we could head off across the North Sea.