Yanmar-san is wounded

When motorsailing through narrow and long passage from my winter harbour I had this thought: it would be really bad if something happened to the engine now!
I had wind directly into my nose, it was very narrow, with stones on the port side and coast on startboard. And I was alone.

Guess what, it happened. Exactly after I had this thought I heard engine alarm - oil !

Shit!

Anchor was ready to deploy but I’ve decided to fight. Off with engine, up with mainsail and genua. It took a minute and I had regained control over the boat. But then it took 2 hours to get myself out of this narrow channel with wind directly ahead. You see, Meritaten is not Skärgårdskryssare or Safir, her minimal pointing angle is around 60 degrees to wind so going up wind is time consuming. But we’ve managed.

After leaving the channel I could finally lace the rudder and go under deck to see what happened. Checking the bilge - shit! Oil in the bilge!

Before I could deploy oil-soaking raggs Meritaten’s automatic bilge pump engaged and spitted out most of it. Nice… I’ve switched off the pump and contained most of the spill in raggs. But I realised that I have no engine right now.

As much as I don’t like inboard engines they are really handy when entering or leaving harbours. When sailing in Poland, on lakes, we didn’t have any engine and we were sailing in and out on sails. Like most other sailors at that time. But our center-board boats displaced only 600 - 800kg. Meritaten has over 4 tons.

Well, no worries, as long as wind is not directly from behind it is manageable. We’ll see when we arrive.

Six hours later we arrived. And guess what - wind was directly from behind. Nice.

As always, you need to have plan A and contingency plans B and C. My plan A was a classic manoeuvre of going into the harbour with the wind, then turn 180 degrees against it, while turning drop the main and roll genua and using boats inertia turn back and enter the harbour with reduced speed. The trick is that you can reduce your speed too much - loosing ability to steer - or not enough - and entering tight harbour too fast.

So you need plan B and C. Mine B was a storm anchor - heavy Hereshoff anchor which ALWAYS grips. If not - plan C: big fenders and boat hook to doge other boats.

Well, it went pretty smooth, on modified plan A.

While approaching with wind I’ve realised that I have no room to make 180 turn hence risking smashing everything around. So instead I went directly to the wind, dropped the main, jumped back to rudder, turned another 180 degrees and started approaching only on small fock. Observing my speed I was rolling in or out the sail to have enough speed for steerability but slow enough to not damage anything.

Two gentlemen sitting on a boat nearby, upon seeing what I do, jumped onto bridge to assist approach. Being sailors they new instantly that I have no engine - nobody does harbour entering on sails in Sweden these days!

Luckily the assistance was not needed - but highly appreciated. All went smooth as it should.

After finishing with shore lines and tiding the sails I could go down and inspect Yanmar-san.

And so I’ve found this.

This pipe is one of 3 oil pipes which run outside of the engine body. This particular one goes directly under salt-water pump which happened to be leaking. And it must have been leaking for some years to corrode the oil pipe to an extend that it simply gave up under pressure.

A nod to previous owner - but also to me, I should have spotted that earlier.

Yanmar 1GM10 engines, like mine, are known for this issue. They are good, reliable engines with only 3 weak points, this one being one of them.

It was a quick fix but I needed to wait a week for spare pipe.

Seems that engineers at Yanmar have finally realised this problem because the new pipe is made of copper. Good! But I will paint it anyway!