-Jon, March 30, o’dark-thirty

I laid in my bunk, enjoying the complete and total silence at 1:30 am here in Eastern North Carolina. The wind from the afternoon, which had been gusting to 30 knots and slamming whitecaps into Eleanor’s port side here in the marina at Belhaven all evening, had finally died down to nothing. I could stop worrying about my Rube Goldberg spider web of lines holding fenders in place to protect our beautiful boat. I didn’t know what had woken me up, but I enjoyed the stillness.

            Wait! It’s going down to freezing tonight. How could it be so quiet right now? I’m not hearing the heating system. No blowing warm air. No generator. NO Generator!!!

            When we tied up to the dock at 3:00 in the afternoon we had been challenged by the wind. Made it in fine but unfortunately found out after the fact that the single 50-amp power outlet we could reach with our fifty-foot cord was broken and only delivering 105 volts on one leg (to the surprise of the marina manager.) Only planning to be here overnight, and not wanting to try and move the boat in the wind I decided we would just stay on ship’s power. Our trusty Kohler 8-KW generator would keep the lights and heat on for us. No problem.

            No problem, at least until there is a problem. Eleanor had gone cold and dark. No power. No heat. No gentle reassuring sounds that all was well. She was just completely still.

            I lay in bed, considering my options. I was currently warm and comforted by the 16-pound Thunder Blanket that Terese had bought for Eleanor’s forward bunks. I wondered how cold it would get in the cabin. Could I wait until morning to try and figure this one out? What could be the problem that caused the generator to shut down? I wondered if it will fix itself.

              With that last thought I realized I was being stupid and needed to get up and see if I could fix the generator. I suited up and creeping stealthily through the boat to avoid waking the rest of the crew I gathered my tool bag, a flashlight, and made my way outside into the frigid air. 

The generator resides in the Lazarette, a compartment at the very back of the boat, under the bench at the aft end of the cockpit. I turned on the LED lights I’d installed inside as part of my rehab project, and the space lit up like noon on a summer day, the light reflecting off the bright white bulkheads that I’d painted last summer. I climbed down into the space to see if I could figure out why the generator had shut down.

My first thought had been maybe an automatic shutdown alarm for something like a low oil level. That would not have been ideal, as it would mean the generator was burning oil, but it would certainly be an easy fix. It also seemed possible – even likely – back when I had been laying snuggly under my thunder-blanket considering the possibilities. I hadn’t checked the generator oil level since Charleston, and we’d run close to 30 hours since then. (I know it’s bad not to have checked the generator out in three days, but I had my excuses.)

A quick check on the dipstick. Oil at the same level as the last time I checked. A happy sad experience. The easy fix for tonight’s problem wasn’t it, but the long term health of the generator was great.

Diesels don’t need much, as I’ve already said. I checked the fuel filter. It’s a new one, with a transparent sight bowl so you can see the quality of the fuel going into the generator’s engine – a three-cylinder Yanmar diesel. The quality was fine – nice clear pink color, no traces of water, algae, or sediment. But the bowl was almost empty. No fuel. I found my problem, but not the cause. Why no fuel?

I started tracing the fuel lines back toward the tank. Back here in the lazarette there were no valves. Those were up forward in the engine room. Nobody had been in there overnight, so I knew valve alignment hadn’t changed and the generator had obviously been running with the existing valve alignment so nothing there to check. I wondered if the fuel pump had failed. If so, we were going to remain cold and dark as I don’t carry a spare onboard. I decided to keep checking other things before assuming anything about the pump.

One benefit to buying a project boat during the Covid pandemic is I’ve had lots of time to work on pretty much every system onboard. One of my repairs/learning experiences had been to replace the secondary fuel filter system on the generator – twice. The first time I had removed the fuel filter to rectify a repair from some previous owner. It ended up being unrepairable and so after a brief course on YouTube University and a six-minute training video, and with a purchase from a diesel parts supplier on the internet, I had installed a brand-new fuel filter system including bleed valves.

Air in a diesel fuel system is bad. The fuel can’t push past the air and the engine shuts down. And that is exactly what our problem turned out to be. Quickly bleeding the air from the system from three different points, the generator fired back up, and as I write this, she is still running strong, heating the boat and brewing us coffee five hours later. Hopefully we are all set, and she just sucked in some air during all the bouncing alongside the dock in the wind.

            Time to go in search of biscuits and gravy in Belhaven before we head north.