Wallace Gouk’s Boat Maintenance - Chapter 2
How the layout of a boat can ruin your summer
The heart of any boat, says Wallace, is in the engine room. Unfortunately, many boat manufacturers make it “too damn hard” to get there. When Wallace surveyed a brand new 44-foot sailboat it took ten minutes to get the engine uncovered. Then, while he could see the oil filter, he could not figure out how to reach it. Furniture and stairs over the engine room access, heavy hatches and no place to put them, a confused layout… there are many barriers and in his experience, Wallace has realized that the harder it is to get into the engine room, the lower the level of maintenance. Stands to reason.
Tidy and Clean in the Engine Room Makes for a Well Maintained Boat
It’s hard to believe but this pristine engine room was a “black hole” when Wallace bought the old trawler it belongs to. It’s a 1981 40-foot Dave Martin custom design. It took a year to clean up and organize. The first step was to hinge the hatches. Then he moved the A/C pumps, potable water pumps, bilge pumps, strainers and batteries. Then he re-routed many hoses and conductors all to get easy access to the engine other systems. Anyone with sharp eyes might see bits of paper towel taped to the generator in the photograph. Wallace noticed a small coolant leak after he cleaned and painted the bilge.
The paper towel is just checking to see if he has fixed it. In a filthy engine room a leak like that would go unnoticed. So do a lot of potential problems.
Unless the engine room is clean and open, chances are you’re going to miss something.
Here are a couple of things that don’t always get the attention they deserve… starting with raw water pumps. If original paint still covers the screws on top of the impeller housing, the impeller has never been changed. When one of those goes, it can do thousands of dollars of damage in seconds. If the see through bowl on the fuel filter is no longer see through, it probably isn’t working efficiently, in which case your engine probably isn’t either. Also do you have any idea when the gear reduction fluid (transmission fluid) was last changed? It wears down just as engine oil wears down and if your gear reduction unit needs to be swapped out you’ll be a long time on the hard. And you know that kind of thing won’t happen in the off season.
The run-of-the-mill maintenance is usually confined to oil, oil filters, fuel filters, and engine flush with antifreeze. That’s good but it’s not enough. There’s more to keeping your boat running all summer. Getting good access is the first step. We’ll have the rest of the story in Chapter 3.