A Bone head oops, a learning moment and Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving rolled around for 2015 and first and foremost how great it is to have so much to be thankful for. One thing is our kids, who despite thinking their parents are nuts, joined us on the boat. Now some of you won't think that is too unusual except we moved onto the boat Sunday and the kids showed up Tuesday. So not much organizing before they got here. Beds made is about all.

  We knew this adventure would have a learning curve but we sure didn’t think we would start curving on Thanksgiving. We wouldn’t have if I’d actually been paying attention . We have my daughters boyfriend here and he is very much into boats. He was very excited to learn everything there is about the boat and how it works. So I decided we needed to run the engine and make all was well with the old Perkins. Remember most things that seem to go wrong are operator error. We went through the pre-start checklist and as usual the engine fires up and ran like a champ. Ran it in forward and reverse and the temp was just starting to come up to temp when it just died!  Went through the usual but rationalized that it stopped the way it did because it had no fuel. After checking the obvious I looked at the fuel shut off switch and it was in the off position. Some work had been done by some contractors in the engine room and it must have been turned off by them. But I also remember checking it so I must have looked at it and it did not register.  Anyway it was off. Now what? Got out the trusty Nigel Calder Diesel Book and began trouble shooting.  Yes we needed to bleed it. No we had never done that before! Well we pretty much followed the sequence and I was glad to have taken the course at the Annapolis School of Seamanship.  One of the good things about the school was being told to get the right tools. I had picked up my Flare Nut Wrench so I could bleed the injectors. After a bit of trial and error getting the lift pump to have pressure in it we got the secondary filter bled and started down the line on the injectors. We got those all bled and then after just a few seconds of cranking she fired right up. Ran like the champ she has always been for us. A few high fives and some beer were now in order. Big thanks to Jon and Joan for working through it with me.

  We were at a seminar with Nigel Calder last year and he said that you never know what you can do until you do it. So big hurdle for us to get the engine back going again.

  Now onto Thanksgiving dinner. We have not yet gotten the stove to light. It looks like we made need a new thermocoupler. So we were not baking anything. But we put together a great meal that included lots of good grilled meat and veggies. But alas no pies. Aren’t pies the reason to have all that turkey as an H de over? We substituted wine I suppose for that. We shared our first holiday afloat with the kids and an engine bleed.
Hope the rest of you had a Happy Thanksgiving.