And so another year goes by.
Another year during which I've singularly failed to maintain this blog although followers of the Pagan facebook page and/or my personal Facebook account will be reasonably up to speed on where things now stand.
Big picture stuff first. I feel I should really put in some serious effort to grow this page and get serious about content creation (both sailing related and in other areas). Bottom line is that I have a great deal of "spare" time at my disposal because nobody wants to employ a 62 year old bloke with disabilities.
I'm going to stop beating about the bush on this point right now. I've always been extremely reluctant to refer to myself as disabled mainly because my dear old Mum was "properly" (in my mind) disabled by M.S. and my problems pale into insignficance with what she had to deal with. However, the simple fact is that I am physically restricted by arthritis (I can't lift heavy weights and I can't stand for long periods), increasingly hard of hearing which is exacerbated by severe tinnitus and whilst I have my mental health demons (manic depression is a far better descriptive tag than "bipolar disorder" but whatever you call it, I've got it!) under control, I have good days when I'm reasonably functional and bad days when I can barely cope.
Put it all together and the range of available jobs I could realistically cope with is limited and definitely doesn't include the physical warehouse work that is virtually all that is available in our neck of the woods. Then add in the neccessity for me to be available to take Jane to and from work at 6:00am and 9:00pm and that pretty much rules out most other available jobs. So I'm working "going forward" (ugh!) on the assumption that, whilst I will keep trying, I am probably effectively retired from the world of gainful employment. So be it.
I don't have a clear plan on this "going forward" (ugh #2!) but I do have a growing feeling that I should be monestising one or more of my various talents. Whether that takes the form of online content creation, writing, music (my old chum Tony played back an ancient recording of some of my songwriting and honestly I was surprised at how good it was after all these years) or something else I don't know.
So anyway, we are still clinging on to the dream and we have now set a departure date.
Saturday the 1st of May 2027 the good ship Pagan will, if the Gods are willing, depart North Fambridge and set sail towards the Shetland Isles on the first leg of our three to four year odyessey around the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
To achieve that goal, and achieve it we must, a number of prerequisites have to be met. Firstly, and most obviously, Pagan has to be ready to go and she isn't by a long chalk. More on that in a moment. Secondly, we have to be in a position financially to live by our own means for two years as we don't qualify for a state pension until the summer of 2029. We were just about on track to make that happen with a combination of savings and our joint modest pension pots but the latest gremlin saga has knocked that back and we don't yet know how badly. This is the key reason I could really really do with an income stream from somwhere. It doesn't need to be a fortune, £10k or so over the next two years would be sufficient to make up the shortfall in our funds.
So where are we at with Pagan?
The ongoing engine problems notwithstanding, there's only a handful of big cost items left on the to do list. The biggest by far is the anchoring gear. There is universal agreement that the current manual anchor windlass has to go. It is horribly slow and really hard work raising the anchor with it and let's be brutally honest, we're not getting any fitter as we get older. So an electric windlass is a must as is new chain and if we're going that far we mught as well replace the anchor with a modern design too. That's probably going to cost around £2.5k but it's pretty much the one thing left on the list that we both agree is non-negotiable and which cannot be skimped on. This is particularly critical gear since, in order to be able to afford to live day by day, we are going to have to stay out of marinas as much as possible (once we set off, our budget will run to maybe one night a week, on average, in a marina, two at the most).
Next on the list is batteries, solar and inverter. On this front, in the light of the engine issues, we've scaled back our plans. Our existing AGM house batteries need to be replaced anyway, one has died altogether and the other is likely to follow it soon enough, so now we plan to replace them with two LiFePo4 batteries, as big as we can squeeze into the battery compartment and scrap the earlier plan to fit a seperate battery bank for the inverter power under one of the saloon seats. We're still going to fit a 2kw to 3kw inverter to power electric cooking appliances but we probably won't be able to cook electrically every day.
Fitting solar panels to Pagan has always been a head scratcher as there's surprisingly little space available on deck. I had come up with innovative solutions to getting quite a lot of solar nailed on but it was going to be quite a costly excercise and we've knocked most of it on the head. We now plan to strap a semi-flexible panel on top of the sprayhood as our main semi-permanent panel and we'll probably add a foldaway "suitcase" panel that can be deployed on deck when at anchor. Then we'll see how we go before spending money on adding more.
The third "big spend" item that cannot be ducked or deferred for much longer is the saloon upholstery. It's falling apart and the seat cushions are shot. New foam for the seats (the backs are OK) and new cushion covers are essential. Commercially made upholstery is frighteningly expensive and neither of us can sew for toffee! However, we may have a solution which needs to be discussed with my cousin and aunt, who can sew, and who may be able to knock up the covers for us for a lot less money.
Beyond those headline items, there's the v-berth refit to complete, there's a lot of varnishing and painting needs doing and a few other maintenance and repair items to be addressed but nothing spectacular or worryingly expensive ...
Which brings is to the socking great elephant in the room ... the engine.
So, dear reader, you will recall that we left matters last September with a provisional diagnosis of a failed engine driven fuel lift pump and with me contemplating how to move or remove the engine in order to get at it.
Well first up, I had a stroke of genius and demolished half the galley! Cutting out the drawer runners and cross bars below the sink and then cutting the entire panel out of the bulkhead between the drawer unit and the engine bay created workable access to the starboard side of the engine where most of the "gubbins" is located. The drawer runners have now been screwed to the bulkhead panel which bolts in place and can thus be easily removed or put back as required. I haven't quite figured out how to refit the front rails yet, I'm trying to avoid screwing them back in place but I may have to.
With working access to the engine, I tried every trick known to man to get the sheared off stub of the injector manifold bleed screw out to no avail. In the end, I had to bite the bullet and drill it out as deep as I dared to go and then tap to M6 to take an M6 bolt with a washer and gasket. So far, it seems to be working and sealing. We'll find out if it's a permanent fix in due course.
Several sources suggested replacing the mechanical lift pump with a high pressure electric pump. I found a cheap Chinese one on Amazon for about £20 so I thought it worth a go. I removed the failed mechanical lift pump (and in the process confirmed that it was indeed failed - the plunger return spring has snapped) and blanked off the takeoff for it. The electric pump stalled when I tried to start the engine due to voltate drop but swapping it over to run off the domestics and starting the engine on it's own battery worked a treat. The venerable old Mercedes started second turn of the key and settled down to idle happily. As we were ashore in the cradle with no engine cooling and it being a bit of a dodgy thing to do, running the engine in a shore cradle, we couldn't test it for more than a minute or two but all seemed well and we were greatly cheered. Oh foolish optimists!
At this point, I ordered a replacement mechanical lift pump from Manfred at Westfield 4x4. The electric pump isn't going to waste however, it will be repurposed and replumbed as a priming and fuel transfer pump in due course. Arriving on board a week or so ago, I set about fitting the new mechanical pump which was no great problem and getting all ready to launch last Monday in the expectation of a couple of days of engine testing and then maybe even getting to go sailing.
Launch we did and once alongside the river pontoon I turned the key confidently expecting the engine to start. Did it heck as like. I spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning chasing things around and couldn't figure out what was wrong at which point I admitted defeat and gave Simon "Engines" Dunn a ring. We were now getting to the stage of more drastic action and I'm not a diesel engine guy. If I started pulling things apart myself, there was a very good chance of doing more harm than good.
Happily, it not being a busy time of year, Simon was able to come out to us on Friday afternoon to investigate and it was not good news. Quite the opposite. The first thing he spotted, that I had not thought to check, was that we had next to no compression on the engine. That's why she wouldn't start. Then he spotted that we had salt water in the fresh water cooling circuit. That's bad!
At this point, it really looked like the engine was going to be beyond repair. As we've previously discussed, we'd love to fit a shiney new red engine (a Beta 35 for choice) but we really can't afford to go down that route. It would set us back at least a year financially and it isn't just about our planned departure date, the bigger picture is that Jane is desperate to retire from what is a physically demanding job with bloody awful hours and understandably does not want to be stuck with it for more than another couple of years. If that's where things had stayed, we'd now be on the hunt for a second hand motor. However, all was not lost.
We talked things over with Simon and decided that it made sense to pull the top end of the engine apart and find out exactly where we stood. For the sake of a couple of hours labour, we'd then know for sure whether there was any hope or none at all.
Meanwhile, it being clear that our sailing season was over before it had even begun and given that being on the pontoon costs money, I rang the office to arrange to lift back out asap. It looked as though we might be stuck on the pontoon for another week and a bit due to the tide times and heights but that sterling chap Wiggy pulled out all the stops and hoiked us out late Friday afternoon. As frustrating as it is being back in the yard cradle, it makes working on the boat much easier.
So anyway, first up Simon pulled apart the Bowman heat exchanger discovering, in the process, that the source of the salt water where there should be fresh was one of the end rubbers which was perished internally. The tube stack was reluctant to come out but eventually gave in to gentle persuasion and suprisingly it all looks to be salvageable. We'll know for sure when it's all been cleaned up but if we can avoid having to replace the heat exchanger that's really good news as they're well over a grand.
Next up, it was off with her head. And again, the expected dire damage internally was most notable by it's absence. There were clear signs of the head gasket blowing on three of the four cylinders (and possibly on the fourth too!) which, given that Simon and I agree that it could well be the original head gasket (based on it's make up and appearance) is hardly surprising!
The valves don't look bad at all and may even only need lapping back into the seats - maybe she'll need new valve seats, again we'll know when Simon has pulled it apart. And finally the bores are OK. There's some evidence of minor water damage from water standing in the bores but nothing that can't be dealt with in-situ. We don't need to pull the engine out of the boat in other words.
The bottom end all seems to be OK, There's no apparent lash on the big and little end bearings, the piston rings all seem to be good to go etc.
So at around 2:00pm it was "you need a new engine" but by 5:00pm it was "it will live again"!
With the top end off, it makes sense to do a full top end overhaul so we'll throw the extra cash at having the injectors serviced (£100 to £120 an injector and we've got four of them!) and whilst we're at it we'll get the parallel glow plugs I bought and never fitted years ago installed and sort out the plumbing for the calorifier which I bottled because I couldn't get the blanking plugs out.
We'll also knock off the other planned engine jobs and fit an uprated alternator and the spin off oil filter kit as well as new senders for the oil pressure and temperature gauges (neither of which have worked since we got the boat).
So the bottom line is that, if those Gods are finally smiling on us, we should come out of this with a good serviceable Mercedes OM636 at the cost of somewhere between £2k and £3k. Given that a good second hand motor of known provenance (as opposed to some random old lump like our existing engine pulled out of a boat because it was being replaced) would be twice that plus fitting and a brand new engine would be double up again and then some (at least £14k by the time it was in), that's a result!
To some extent I am, I have to confess, culpable in that I have neglected the engine since before Covid kicked in, I have either missed or ignored several warning signs of impending trouble and she really should have been properly mothballed back in 2018/19. In my defence, there's been an awful lot of stuff going on over the last five years both boat related and away from the boat and the head gasket and fuel pump problems were probably going to happen anyway sooner or later. Looking on the bright side, better that they happen now whilst we're still here at Fambridge than it manifesting itself in the Shetland or Orkney Isles or somewhere similarly remote!.
I shall have to do better in future
So anyway, we still have more than a week on board. Simon will hopefully progress the cylinder head and heat exchanger refurb back at his workshop this week but we won't be bolting things back together for a while yet. I've gone as far as I can with rebuilding the partially demolished galley sink unit as it's all got to come out again to rebuild the engine.
Our next mission is to look at replacing the cooker which is on it's last legs. We've had a nearly new replacement sitting in the container for yonks, it's time it was on the boat! That's today's mission. Then there's the planned microwave shelf above the nav table, much cleaning, sorting and tidying that needs doing, progress can be made on the v-berth refit etc.
Onwards and ... onwards
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| In, out, shake it all about |
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| Demolishing the galley drawer unit |
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| Now we can see the job! |
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