Where to begin? For years and years, mine and Phillip’s “arch nemesis” on boats seemed to be davits, as we’ve had not ONE, but TWO incidents where they failed on us. But, I’m starting to think we have a new foe. We’ve had a time with it, I can tell you. But, before we dig into the dirty, sooty saga, know that it’s all been resolved and we’re still cruising merrily along despite the upset. (We always do!) After we left our winter home in Brunswick, GA to start heading first to the Bahamas in the spring, then north to New England for the summer, our summer cruising season 2024 started out with a seemingly devastating bang.
Leaving Brunswick, GA — February 2024:
It had been three long months, Ubi sat in the cold in Brunswick. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fabulous place—I wrote all about it here—but it was cold, below freezing at times, and Ubi doesn’t like to sit anywhere!
** Special thanks to my wonderful friend, Bridgett, who drove six hours (each way) with me to check on Ubi in the cold and keep her toasty when the temps dropped below freezing. Bridgett (and Gia!) we love you!! **
When February 2024 came, Phillip and I had been packing, planning, and practically itching to get cruising again. We left early on a Thursday morning hoping to get a jump on the weather and make a nice 24-hour run south to St. Augustine, FL. We tossed the lines and motored out under a gorgeous silky sunrise.
Spirits and hopes were high as we motored out under the picturesque Sidney Lanier Bridge. The wind was light but sailable and we enjoyed a nice day under a gentle breeze making good way south. In the early afternoon, the winds started to die out, so we cranked our engine (an 80 hp Yanmar engine we lovingly named “Yannick”). We were motor-sailing along for an hour or so when Phillip started to notice a bit of a sooty, diesel smell around the engine. He lifted the companionway stairs to get access to the engine and smoke billowed out. Of all the possible good things I could imagine to billow out of an engine room—a nice, rosy smell, a bright, inspiring light perhaps—smoke is not one. Understandably alarmed, Phillip called out to me topside.
“The engine is smoking,” he said. In a calmer voice than I would have.
“Smoking?!” I asked, not sure why, as I know what smoking means.
We went down to investigate and an obvious grey exhaust was piling out from under the companionway stairs, but it seemed impossible to find its source. However, finding our engine in this state not one day into the very start of our cruising season was, to say the least, disheartening. But, from years of cruising (which can also be called “boats breaking down in exotic places”) we know sometimes a seemingly really bad sign can be a simple problem and easy fix. Of course, this also means the opposite can also be true—i.e., a seemingly easy problem may actually be an indicator of a much more substantial, costly fix. For the moment, Phillip and I were remaining calm, trying to find the source of the smoke that should have been captured in Yannick’s exhaust system and expelled out the back of the boat with the hot water from the heating system, but it was not.
We opened up the lazarette on the starboard side, which is the workshop on Ubi, providing access to the generator, water maker, all the tools, fluids, spares, supplies, etc., as well as the prop shaft, engine muffler and exhaust hose, and the Raycor fuel filters.
As soon as we opened the lid, smoke began puffing out. Thinking it was somehow escaping from the fat exhaust hose that came off the elbow connected to the riser, Phillip had me try to wrap rescue tape around and around the joint hoping to stop the spew, but the exhaust was too thick to breathe and the tape wasn’t sticking and holding (probably due to operator error as it was a very hard, hot spot to try to wiggle my sweaty fingers in to snake the tape around).
The engine was holding temp just fine, which was a good sign. Whatever exhaust leak we had, it seemed pretty minor for now and it was enabling us to keep making way. The question was where we were going to go considering our new smoky status as it no longer seemed prudent to continue on overnight to St. Augustine with light winds and a puffing engine. Jacksonville was five (5) nautical miles away, the closest port. Phillip and I debated calling Boat U.S. to be towed into Jacksonville but we always approach that as a last measure. Other than the mess and unpleasantness of spewing exhaust, which was contained under the companionway stairs but now billowing out of the open starboard lazarette, Yannick was purring along just fine, holding temp and easily moving the boat at 6 knots toward safety.
Right or wrong, we decided to puff on in and find the nearest dock or anchorage location we could to to get sorted. Mind you, we’d never been into Jacksonville by sailboat before, ever. Of course. Always a good time to try our hand at a new inlet. Hooray!
As luck (good or bad) always does, it played a huge role for us. We still had the sails up and some wind filled in just as we were motoring into the Jacksonville inlet that was really moving us fast. We also, by sheer happenstance, caught the tide coming in, so it was working with us, and we zipped right in the inlet making 8.5 knots. That was wild. We saw an empty T-dock that luckily offered enough depth for us to dock at a public boat ramp, and we had long ago decided we were after only forgiveness, not permission, in order to get Ubi safely docked. We glided in, tied up, and turned Yannick off so he could cool, and we could figure out what the heck we were going to do.
We were also lucky it was a Thursday so we had one more business day ahead of us to perhaps get a mechanic out to help. We were lucky that the first mechanic we could find in the nearby area via Google was both a Yanmar certified dealer and—far more importantly—he answered the phone AND agreed to stop by the next day to drop us off some spare exhaust hose from his truck. We thought perhaps the hose between the elbow and the muffler was our culprit, that it had somehow split or otherwise been compromised, and if we replaced it that would solve our exhaust problem. We poked around the engine some after we docked, but it was too hot to touch anywhere so we couldn’t do an effective search for the faulty part in our exhaust system. It was also getting late into the evening at this time and we were beat from the stressful day. Phillip and I made a hand-to-mouth dinner and some stiff drinks and pored over diesel manuals and Nigel Calder books before crashing hard on the dock in Jacksonville.
Feeling a bit fresher the next morning and with Yannick cooled down to touch-temps, we were able to do a deeper inspection on Friday morning. Just looking around the workroom on Ubi was distressing. She was covered in a layer of obstinate soot that took 12-20 passes with a Magic Eraser just to get it to ease up. Cleaning Ubi after all of this was going to be a monstrous chore. Two photos below show her clean on the left and sooty on the right. : (
But, more important than the mess, was the source. We needed to find the problem, pronto.
Phillip started tracing the exhaust system from start to finish. When he got to the point where the riser bolts onto the engine block, he could feel the problem without even seeing it. He instructed me to run my hands along the same area. I could feel it, too, and could even get my head and camera in enough to get a good picture of it.
It felt both good to find the problem—Step One—but also devastating to find that it was a cracked engine part. This was not something that hose, or rescue tape, or clamps, or goo would fix. This was the type of failure that can put an end to your cruising season if you’re not prepared for it, or if you run into bad luck or delays trying to source a fix for it. The riser had cracked at the weld where its tube meets the flange that bolts onto the engine. Meaning, it was still bolted on to the engine block, but it had cracked off.
The riser/elbow was completely out of commission. There was no easy way to repair this riser/elbow and simply keep on trucking. It needed to be re-welded, if that was even a possibility, to make it perform again. This was a substantial failure. However, we did have one very good (bad?) thing going for us. Phillip and I always say on the boat: “The easiest problem to fix on the boat is one you’ve fixed before.” This might have prompted you to ask: “Have Phillip and Annie dealt with a busted riser/elbow before on Ubi?” The answer?
Yes, yes we have. In fact, the riser/elbow we were looking at now, with the cracked flange, was only 2.5 years old. Far younger than it should have been to suffer typical riser/elbow build-up and failure, much less a catastrophic crack. But, the sole reason we had a replacement riser/elbow on the boat in Jacksonville, simply waiting to be bolted into place, was because we had dealt with a riser/elbow failure before, one that almost stopped our cruising season back in 2021. Do you remember? I’ll share an extremely truncated refresher:
Our Riser/Elbow Saga — Sep-Oct 2021:
It all started with an attempt to be good little boaters and simply do some preventative maintenance. When our pre-purchase survey on Ubiquitous showed a rusty riser/elbow on our 80 hp Yanmar (4JH80), it was recommended to have it pulled and inspected, so we did. I think my face expertly expresses our impression of the riser/elbow after we removed it.
It appeared to be in rough shape, so we decided to have a new riser/elbow fabricated to replace it. Know that the Yanmar in our Outbound 46 is computer-designed to fit inside of our engine space (under the companionway stairs); meaning, there is hardly an inch to spare in our engine room. For that reason, the riser/elbow is a custom fit to each Outbound, not a part provided by Yanmar. Hence, the reason we had to have a new one fabricated to fit our specific engine space.
We sent our rust-bomb riser/elbow off, from Annapolis, MD, where we first took possession of Ubi, to an expert fabricator in Virginia in September, 2021. He did an exceptional job. However, in the process of shipping both the old and new riser/elbow back to us, a terrible thing happened. UPS lost the package. Oops. They lost it. A huge, heavy package with two engine pieces in it! Phillip and I called their help line—screaming “Speak. To. A. Huuuuummman!” so often it makes me sick thinking about it—for weeks, to no avail. The package was irretrievably lost. This left us with both a custom hole in our engine room that only an expert fabricator could fill and just a few short weeks to fill it, before winter closed in on us in Annapolis and left Ubi wrapped on jacks for the winter: our first winter owning her! Unacceptable. So, what were our options?
Our fabricator in Virginia was having surgery, so he was out. Collection Yachts, who now builds the Outbounds, is located in Xiamen, China, which was on national holiday. Locally, in Annapolis, we were just weeks away from the Annapolis Boat Show, which meant every marine service provider in the greater Annapolis was booked solid for months. Uggghhhh. I got desperate. I got scared. I got cookies, and started running around Jabin’s Ship Yard begging anyone who could help us. After multiple strike-outs and hard Nos, I finally got lucky and found a fabricator who had a job fall through, leaving him a few days’ worth of time to spare, and he offered it to us. Hallelujah!
The same day—I swear I cannot make this craziness up—Collection had spoke with the owner of the newest Outbound, which was going to be in the Annapolis Boat Show, and he was willing to sell us his spare riser/elbow and have Collection make him a new one. We didn’t even know this guy—we’re now lucky to call him, Leo, and his lovely wife, Diane, on s/v Orion friends—and he offered to save our necks at the buzzer.
Phillip and I couldn’t believe both our bad luck AND good luck. We now had a brand-new riser/elbow being fabricated for us AND a Collection riser/elbow coming to us via “Sistership Shipping!” Phillip aptly named it. We will never trust UPS with boat parts, or perhaps anything, ever again.
The fabricated riser/elbow was completed and installed first. We stashed the Sistership elbow on the boat and Phillip and I tossed the lines and headed south as fast as we could in October 2021 to escape the freeze. We dubbed it our “September to Remember.” It was a saga worthy of print in SAIL Magazine. If you’re intrigued, you can read more details about our 2021 saga in Part One and Part Two on the blog and in the Sistership Shipping article that ran in SAIL Magazine.
Ubi cruised up and down the East Coast and to both the Bahamas and New England two years in a row with that riser/elbow until … February 8, 2024.
Our Riser/Elbow Fix – February 2024:
Meanwhile in Jacksonville … Once Phillip and I realized our problem was the riser/elbow, we removed the busted riser and its cracked flange (the two being now completely separated), and we pulled out the spare riser/elbow that Leo had sailed to us in Annapolis on Orion back in 2021 and started mocking it up. Because we had done this process before (several times) during our 2021 fiasco, we were fairly experienced with it. We removed the turbo charger from the port side of the engine, as this makes the mock-up and swap-out much easier. The riser/elbow from Leo looked to be a good fit visually. Phillip and I took big heaping breaths and hoped for the best.
During this time, we also heard from the mechanic we had called the night before. He was coming by to drop off our spare hose, but there was no way we were going to let him get away from the boat without begging him to help us with the swap-out. Phillip and I have become pretty proficient mechanics in our years cruising, but I wouldn’t call us professional diesel mechanics by any means, and certainly not Yanmar-certified ones. We were thrilled to have this mechanic—whose name, I kid you not, is Angel; he was indeed our angel—come aboard to handle our repair or at least supervise.
Angel got a laugh when we showed him the problem: our cracked riser/elbow. “Yeah, that’ll do it,” he said. Angel set right to work removing the hoses and other parts needed to install the new riser/elbow. Phillip diligently handed Angel tools and watched him work while I spent about six hours scrubbing the soot-covered workroom in the starboard lazarette and engine room interior (working around the boys) trying to get Ubi cleaned up.
Phillip and I held our breath as Angel maneuvered the turbo charger back into place—a critical moment we knew from our efforts in 2021—to complete the install. Angel had to wedge and smash and curse a little (perhaps a lot) to get it in there with the charger, but when he deemed our replacement operation complete, we were thrilled. We cranked Yannick up and shouted at the tops of our lungs as he purred inside the hull, with not a whiff of smoke coming out of him. The new riser/elbow was working beautifully, and we were ready to toss the lines and continue our cruise having only lost a day’s voyage and suffered a busted riser/elbow.
Some photos from the days after our sooty saga. We were able to keep on trucking and make our way down to St. Augustine, just as planned, only a day behind. Who can complain about that outcome considering the catastrophe we were facing.
I share this story because the only reason we had a spare riser/elbow on board the boat, just in case of an emergency, is because we had dealt with a faulty (okay, missing counts as faulty) riser/elbow before. A spare riser/elbow is not something many cruisers carry aboard. Although every sailor would like to, you just cannot, in reality, carry an entire spare boat with you when you cruise. And, I can assure you, a spare riser/elbow is not something Phillip and I used to carry aboard Plaintiff’s Rest.
So, the only reason we were so well-prepared for this upset and able to get it fixed and carry right back on with our cruise is precisely because of the infuriating saga we had dealt with before. The lesson: sometimes (or maybe all times) whatever infuriating saga you are currently working your way through is likely educating and preparing you to expertly navigate a similar saga down the road with the beauty of wisdom and, if you’re lucky, the lifeline of having the right spare parts or tools on board.
So, take those infuriating sagas in stride, knowing they are only making you stronger, wiser, and more prepared. Say “thank you” and keep on cruising. And, remember:
Good to know about the bears. Watch out for those. Be safe out there, folks. : )