By Sailing Red Seas
French Polynesia is known for its traditional dancing, humpback whales, and world-class surfing. Major boat refits? Not so much. But that’s exactly where we found ourselves earlier this year. There we were, live-streaming to our YouTube followers on Sailing Red Seas, with our Leopard 47 catamaran SV Indioko tied up at the marina works dock, completely engine-less, praying that Cyclone Nat wouldn’t smash her hulls into the concrete. To understand how we ended up in this delightful mess, let me take you back eight months to when Brioni and I were sailing alone across the Pacific Ocean from Panama. Everything was going swimmingly… until it wasn’t.
Disaster Strikes
After clearing the dreaded doldrums of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), we were about 24 hours away from picking up the trade winds that would carry us through the rest of our 4,000 nautical mile journey across the South Pacific. That’s when our port engine decided it was done playing nice. And it didn’t just throw in the towel quietly. Oh no, this was an all-out spectacular meltdown. Instead of simply overheating (and in spite of our schedule to alternate our engines every 6 hours) it spewed all its coolant and oil out of the exhaust, transforming from a reliable diesel workhorse into a molten hunk of iron. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating but trust me, we weren’t getting that engine back. To make matters worse, our starboard engine, apparently unimpressed with its new workload, started acting up too. So there we were, limping across the Pacific Ocean with one semi-working engine and plenty of time to contemplate our next move.
Stuck in Paradise: What Now?
When we finally limped into Tahiti, we had four potential scenarios for how to deal with this engine crisis, none of them particularly appealing. Option one: rebuild the engines from scratch. While we’re no strangers to DIY boat work, this was way beyond our usual projects. The Yanmar 4JH4E’s big end bearings had literally melted onto the shaft, meaning there could be hidden damage throughout. Rebuilding would be like peeling back layers of mechanical misery, potentially leaving us stranded in Tahiti indefinitely.
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