TECHNICAL INSTALLING A NEW ENGINE

When a mysterious loss of coolant jeopardised his sailing, Andy Du Port knew the time had tome to replace his yacht’s:veteran Volvo Penta

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A uxiliary engines, as they were called in the old days, were hot, noisy, smelly lumps of metal that weren’t usually powerful enough to motor into wind or tide. My first yacht, which I bought in 1979, had a single-cylinder Stuart Turner petrol engine. It had about three moving parts, tended to misbehave on the starboard tack, but reacted remarkably well to a shouted command to buck up when its sense of duty was wanting. Its power output was less than the average lawn mower and if full astern was engaged 20 yards before her berth (metres had not been invented back then), there was a fighting chance the boat would stop before causing too much damage. On the upside, it was easy to maintain and could be removed from the boat and taken home in the boot of the car.

My second boat, an elderly 28ft Twister, had an unreliable two-cylinder petrol engine which I soon replaced with a brand new Bukh 10 diesel, doubling the horsepower at a stroke. Basic maintenance was still within my capabilities – a set of spanners and a hammer solving most problems. Then engines became more sophisticated and the cost of spare parts rocketed. We had another two boats, each with slightly more powerful ‘donks’, before we bought Kudu, a Hallberg-Rassy 34, in 2005. Her original 1998 29hp Volvo Penta MD2030B was archaic by today’s standards but, apart from changing the oil, filters, impellers and the occasional worn out rubber hose, there wasn’t much that could be done before professional help was needed. And so, towards the end of the 2021 sailing season, the saga began...

COOLANT LOSS