So 2 and half weeks after we left we had our first engine issue.
We were almost at our anchorage spot in Mera (opposite of La Coruña) and about 300m from the anchorage the engine stopped! F*** 😱, stay calm. I’m at the steering and Pierre and Dani are at the anchor locker. I call Pierre to restart the engine, but it won’t start. We do need to react quite fast. The lazy-bag is completely closed and we don’t have the time to remove everything, so I decided to pull out a little Genoa to keep some speed and reach the spot. Checking the map, there are some rocks on our starboard side, the wind is low and a shallow patch in front of us. I check the depth I ll try to go a bit further and anchor in the 5-6m deep water north of the shallow patch. There is almost no wind so the boat speed doesn’t allow me to sail upwind enough to go above these rocks. Therefore, I decided to drop anchor right where we were, before coming too close to the rocks. As soon as we have less than 10m of water below us I think: Let’s go! I face the wind to slow down the boat, ask Pierre to furl the Genoa a bit more and tell Dani to drop the anchor with a little extra chain while hoping we won’t drag.
Anchor is dropped I set up the anchor alarm we checked it while we pulling down the dingy with the 9.9 in case we drag. It took us less than 5minutes. ( Although, I still think it’s too long I need to find another option in case of emergencies or engine failures) After 10 minutes the boat is not dragging. We slowly release the emergency mode and try to breathe again.
We spend the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what the issue was. Luckily we have all the documents (troubleshooting-list, owner manual, service manual) and the carefully noted recommendations from Jean Claude’s training on the engine. We clean all the fuel filters as we think it’s a fuel issue the engine was running perfectly before it stopped after 2h the engine is still not starting we decided to have a break and a cold beer as we can’t figure out the issue. After the 🍺, a few online tutorials, and a bit more tinkering we finally figured out that we just ran out of diesel 🙈🙈🙈. The fuel gauge isn’t working and always shows a full tank. The worst and the best at the same time.
This was the first time we faced a really tough situation where we needed to react fast. I think this whole experience gave me some learnings, which I’ll try to list below :
- Don’t close the lazy jack before arriving at the anchorage
- Don’t trust your instruments, or check them all the time, they can always fail.
- Always check that you have gas ⛽️ before dismounting everything on the engine.
- I need to find a better way to install the 9.9 in case of emergency engine fail.
- Learn more about marine-diesel-engines, which we actually did trying to find the issue. I’ll do a specific logbook entry for this one
- Improve the frequency of the engine little maintenance