Last Saturday (June 26) dawned bright and clear, with high temps forecast (as all of our West Coast neighbors can attest), so I knew there wasn’t going to be a lot of wind. Debbie and I threw back some coffee and motored the mighty Prius up to Tahoe, where we loaded two full sailbags and two storage bins of cargo into our floating summer home. While Debbie put things away below decks, I replaced the turnbuckle on one of the shrouds (thank you, Pete Lewis of Tahoe Sailboat Service) and got out the Loos Gauge to tension the shrouds and stays, attached the reefing lines, then fixed a broken latch on the galley under-sink door. As my good friend Ancil Sigman says, it’s always something on a sailboat.

We motored out a 1/4 mile or so and set sail, but the winds were light and variable at about 2-3 knots, so we drifted hither and yon for about an hour and decided to get out out the sun and back on the hook. I fired up the Perkins Perama M20 and headed back to the mooring buoy.

When we arrived, Debbie said, “Hey, what’s that burning smell?”—five words you never want to hear on a boat. I jumped below and realized the engine had overheated. All the water in the reservoir had evaporated, and the smell was from the very warm rubber tubing. I vented everything as best I could, and after a while, gently opened up the radiator cap with a thick towel, as we’d only had the engine running about 10 minutes. A blast of steam came out, followed by a small eruption of rusty goo splattering all over the fiberglass above the engine.

What I suspect happened was that the thermostat got stuck closed, maybe rusted from the long layup. After she cooled down, I topped off the reservoir with water once again and she fired right up, and I could feel from the sea water pump and the tubing that cold water was running through her once again. I ran it for about 10 minutes, and everything seemed to be OK. Nevertheless, I ordered a new thermostat from Trans-Atlantic Diesel and intend to put that in this coming Saturday morning—after first removing the old one and flushing out the water channels which likely got rusty/gunky during the long layup.

I always try to seize a victory out of the jaws of defeat, so one thing I am proud of was rigging a shade sail to keep us out of the sun when the boat was on the hook. I had a triangular woven “shade sail” from Costco ($29) and used eight WalMart carabiners ($12) to attach it to the boom, lifelines, and backstay for an excellent, airy boom tent that was just delightful to hang out under after the work was done. We lolled about for a couple of hours in the 85º F. heat, and I even pulled on my shorty wetsuit to take a dive, on the hunt for that dang impeller I dropped overboard (No luck as yet!). I’ll keep you posted.

Fair winds and following seas. DB