TOM CUNLIFFE
really began. After half a day of lying in an agonising position,
coming up occasionally for air and a different tool, it became
clear that whoever installed the engine had omitted to consider the
possibility that it might one day be necessary to remove the starter.
A vital bolt was out of sight and, even by feeling, no spanner on
earth could reach it. The only answer was to dig a hole in the
galley bulkhead and poke a socket through on a long extension.
The joinery was splendid, but what could a chap do? I wisely
waited until my wife went ashore, then grabbed hammer and
chisel, threw pots and pans clear of my aim and ripped miserably
into the varnished teak. Finally, out came the motor. A heap of
rust. Clearly my antics with the airlock had been spraying the
works with salty water that destroyed anything electrical in the
whole engine space.
A desirable feature of the MD3B is its readiness to be hand-
started. I knew about this because I’d seen some locals in the
Caribbean cranking one up. All you had to do was decompress
the three cylinders and wind away. Once the flywheel was
spinning up to speed, the compressors were dropped one by one.
It hiccupped on one cylinder, ran lumpily on two and burst into
life on three. I’d gained the confidence to hand-start a diesel on
a four-cylinder Lister running the harbour generator on a coaster
where I served as mate. It had been rebuilt by the skipper after
he’d fired the engineer for drunkenness, and while he’d managed
to get it running, he’d forgotten to re-install the decompressors.
Fortunately, he hadn’t done a great job on the valve guides either,
so compression was well down. A desperate man with attitude
could swing it into life without breaking an arm, but it took
determination. Street cred was hard to come by on that ship
and being able to battle the Lister into life supplied it in buckets,
so I caught on fast. By comparison, the Volvo looked like
a piece of cake – but it wasn’t. Unless I wanted to destroy more
of the boat, the joinery made turning the handle impossible.
By the time the starter had come back from its rebuild, I’d
rigged a sort of faucet on the break in the piping where I hit the
airlock. All I now had to do when water refused to flow was open
a tap. A hose diverted the outpourings into the bilge and all was
sort of well, except that the pump on the back of the engine that
powered an external hydrostatic drive was giving endless trouble.
Finally, in darkest South America, this wretched engineering
mistake literally fell off its mountings. I crawled over the Volvo
to see if there was anything realistic I could do. Outside assistance
was a long way off budget and something suddenly snapped inside
me. I’d had enough.
I vowed to have nothing further to do with the whole caboodle
and henceforth to sail engineless. Like the evangelist recounting
his moment of conversion, my chains fell off and my heart was
free. No longer a slave to mechanical misery, I could concentrate
on the things that really mattered: my rig, my garboards and the
way of a good ship sailing the sea.