On_Board_556_July201.. - Mana Cruising Club

fitted the new keel they added an extra floor frame to support theslightly different keel shape. What they omitted was to put limberholes in it. A pool of water that had collected against this new floorframe but the water was stopped from flowing forward and downhillinto the main bilge area (where the main bilge pump is located).The water had to have come from somewhere aft of this new floorso I started tracking this down. It was brackish water. It had to beeither the engine cooling pipes, the aft-most water tanks (two), orthe hot water cylinder that tees into the engine heat exchanger.Later in the morning we awoke to a friendly call from a passinglocal in his dinghy. He had heard of our plight and had come overto offer us help. Graeme Moore was fantastic – Mangonui has a realpositive set of memories for us as a result of meeting Graeme. Hedid everything possible including inviting us for dinner and lendingus his dinghy and offering to arrange an urgent slip if we needed it.He really brightened up our flagging spirits.Anyway, the water level had not increased overnight so we pumpedthe boat completely dry and towelled out all the bilges and startedour hunt for the leak.At this stage we still thought it was most likely to be either damageto the hull or a pressure leak in a corroded through-hull. The idea itcould be the new keel we thought was possible but unlikely.To cut a very long story short we spent the next three days rulingout things, rather than finding the source. We dived under the boatto check for damage. It was fine as far as we could see. We wentfor test sails to check for high pressure leaks in the though-hulls.We couldn’t even reproduce the leaks on the open water sail southto the beautiful Whangaroa Harbour. At Whangaroa we met upwith Nikki and Doug on ‘Karie-L’. It was great to see them bothand Doug dived with me to check out the keel again. We foundnothing wrong.It was about this point that I started to suspect it could be freshwater so I dismantled the furniture to get access to the most likelytanks (we have 3 separate tanks). I thought I could see a small holein one of the corners of one tank but this tank was almost emptyat this stage, so it was difficult to test this theory, but it soundedplausible.Next day we headed down to Kerikeri as Dave had to get a flighthome. My plan was to fill up the water tanks there and check forleaks. Dave left for the airport. I carried on looking.The next day I found a clue. When the guys at Lloyd StevensonsIt took another day to isolate it to a leaking hot water cylinder, butwhat I need to understand was how this relatively small amount ofwater (I reckoned about 3 gallons) could build up into so muchup forward. Water was running out of the cylinder whenever theengine was running. It would run down from the hot water cylinderand end up against the new floor frame and sit there until we wereheeling over. If we heeled to starboard it flowed around the newfloor frame and ran into the main bilge area normally to be pumpedout with general bilge water (we get some running the inside of themast when it rains).However if we heeled to port it would work its way forward past thecollection area and under some circumstances (high angles of heeland lots of pitching) can get ‘stuck’ in three big pooling areas of theforward bilge to starboard. A contributing factor to what happenedwas that one of the limber holes up forward was also blocked. Daveand I found this when we were drying out the bilges early on butwe didn’t get the significance of it at the time. This blockage waspreventing any bilge water that did run forward from running backaft again.All this resulted in the leaking water from the hot water cylinderaccumulating in the hidden sections of the bilge on the starboardside and building up volume there until it all flowed over the lastframe under the mast and into the forward head where it built upsome more (we don’t use this head at sea so we didn’t notice it) andthen over the door sill into the forward most bilge where it got stuckdue to the blocked limber hole. That’s where I first saw it!In all likelihood the amount of water I saw had built up quietlyin the hidden bilge area for several days from when the hot watercylinder started leaking. It just took the increased heel and pitchingto move it out of its collection areas and over the floorboards.So, there you are. A simple leak that confused the hell out of usand ruined our race. Why was it salty? Probably because it swilledaround in the salty bilge. It tasted like salt water to me, but it wasprobably just brackish and I jumped to the conclusion that tastingsalty meant it was sea water. If I had made the distinction we mayhave been content to keep going and our race would have had amuch different ending.‘The Night Train’ is now resting peacefully for us in Kerikeri Marina.We are looking forward to the next RNI race and some unfinishedbusiness.....Mike McDermott17