After a good night’s sleep in the lee of Prickly Pear island while the occasional squall passed by overhead, I was ready to clear into the BVI and head to Nanny Cay early in the morning. I waffled about the boat in the first hour and then motored across to Gun Creek with my yellow “Q” flag flying. It is looking very ratty and torn, I think I had it up on some long passages when I didn’t need to; but I won’t be replacing it anytime soon since there’s nobody about to complain about the condition of the flag. After I anchored off Gun Creek I got the transom down, put the engine and fuel and other items aboard the dinghy and put on a fresh shirt with a collar in order to go ashore and clear in. There were two lady officers manning the desks this morning who were very friendly and efficient, what took a long timeto complete was my filling out the 3 lengthy entrance forms.
After I’d officially entered the country I opted to postpone my trip to Nanny Cay until Monday morning and I motored upwind inside the North Sound towards Saba Rock, where I knew that I could get a WiFi connection during the day and some food and drinks in the evening and found a spot in 20 feet of water alongside Prickly Pear island. This spot is a good one, since the strong current flowing parallel to the shore is aligned with the winds and the boat barely swings at anchor at all. The only downside is that the boat traffic, particularly the big local boats, have no idea of no-wake zones and occasionally the boat and shoreline will get hit with a significant set of wakes.
I had postponed changing the oil and oil filter on the generator for a long time and at 11AM decided it was time to attack that project. Because of my energy use, I run the generator almost every day and that means that the engine is always very warm (the insulating sound enclosure keeps both the noise and the heat inside) and I hadn’t run it in 3 days so it was nice and cool. I debated opening the impeller to see how it was faring and decided against that effort but did clean out the particle filters for both the genset and the main engine as both had collected some weed and other detritus.
According to the manual I did need to warm up the engine to ensure adequate oil flow but when I did fire up the generator I noticed that there was no water flow at all; so after running less than a minute and before the engine got warm I shut it down and proceeded to check the impeller. As can be seen below, there no surprise as to why there was no cooling water moving and I proceeded to replaced the impeller but this time it took ages to complete, despite calm conditions and a cold engine. Two hours later, and numerous dire oaths directed at engineers who never have to repair or maintain their own engines, I had the impeller replaced. I ran the engine both to ensure that I had no water leaking and to warm it up for the subsequent oil change. At least the oil change went without a hitch, I even used a plastic bag to successfully catch the dripping oil from the filter, which is of course located at the lowest point of the engine and relatively inaccessible to maximize drippage.
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