It was bound to happen someday … a serious mechanical breakdown, but did it really need to happen in the Bahamas? For a day or two prior, we thought we smelled an exhaust smell underway, but not unusual when the wind blows from behind us. I checked the engines several times with nothing seeming amiss.

Obviously, I didn’t look closely enough! It’s hard to tell how long it had been this way, but this gap opened up, allowing exhaust gases to leak out.  Not too serious … unless you know how a marine exhaust system with a lift muffler works.  Unlike a car’s exhaust, seawater gets mixed with the exhaust once it leaves the engine to keep the exhaust hoses cool.  That causes a multitude of complications, but a modern answer for most boats is the lift muffler.  Without going into extreme detail, the seawater travels downward into the muffler & is then “lifted” up & out overboard with & powered by the exhaust gases.  See where I’m going? With reduced exhaust gases, the lift muffler can’t expel the water & it backs up into the engine.  Bad?  Yes, potentially $30,00 bad.

On the left is what’s left of the old machine screws & gasket. On the right making gaskets & making flathead machine screws.

The first order of business was to eliminate the saltwater sitting in the engine cylinders & get the engine running.  Saltwater (for even a day or two) could cause severe damage.  The process is fairly straightforward – remove the fuel injectors & turn over the engine to expel the water. Wow! Expel it did!  While only a few ounces, the water shot out everywhere, even up to the ceiling.  Clean up, re-assemble, then drain the water from the lift muffler, leaving the plug out so it will drain into the bilge & not backup into the engine.  Start ‘her up – yeahh!! – she ran fine!

We can’t let the exhaust water drain into the bilge for more than a few minutes & we still have almost 300 miles before we reach the U.S.  Do we limp back on one engine?  Temporarily fixing the exhaust leak could be simple … but … no.

Success! 3 long days later, I was finally able to extract the 2 broken & 1 mangled screws from the end of the turbocharger with just 7″ of working room, only visible with a mirror.  Replacement metric screws … in the Bahamas?  Got close, but not flat head, so I turned them into flat heads with a Dremel.  No replacement gaskets? I luckily found some high temp gasket material at a gas station.

A Spanish Wells fishing boat leaving the harbor with it’s “ducklings” – they tow these small boats over a hundred miles to their lobstering grounds where they split up each day to cover a larger fishing area.

On day 5 we were finally able to depart Spanish Wells, Eleuthera, fuel up & begin our trek back to Florida.  We had originally planned on heading west to The Berrys, then crossing back, but south winds & waves made it prudent to head north to the Abacos, then across. The engine operates fine, but it looks like we’ll have a week or more delay in the Abacos for lots of windy weather on the way (again).