I am learning. so when possible, i go in the sea. To go in and out of the marina, using an engine is mandatory – unless the engine breaks.
Theoretically, if the wind blows in the right direction and speed, in case the engine breaks, I should be able to not just sail into the marina – but into the boat’s mooring place. In case the engine fails and I can not sail into the marina, or indeed to moor the boat – the marina has a motor boat that, for the correct fees, will tow the yacht and help resolve the situation.
A few days ago, I ws at sea.. After a few hours, as the sun began to go down and change the water colours into all kinds of orange, I prepared returning to the marina.
The engine turned on fine, but it would not get into gear. It worked on Neutral.
The image at the top shows a leaver that needs to be tipped port-side to go into forward moving gears, and starboard side for backwards moving gears.
It would not move either direction unless that little red button was pressed. Pressing that button is what you want to do for placing the engine in neutral.
Thoughts from the 1st paragraph here began to fill my head pretty fast.. I tried to find what’s wrong, or could be wrong. Afteral, there are all sorts of mechanical lines that pull into the engine from the back of that leaver.
Nothing seemed suspect. however, as things go in these kind of situations. I turned it off and on, and Yo! Suddenly we are in business.
Cool? Not so fast. We needed to find out what went wrong. For that, there’s a really friendly forum of hobbyist sailors that tend to come up with appropriate ideas – if not solutions.
It was generally suggested I should take the whole leaver mechanism apart and give it a good clean. Not an easy job given the thing is glued to the boat – but possible. One post mentioned that the problem might actually be the little red button. Apparently, sometimes they need a bit of a clean – else they don’t pop out enough to allow changing gears – hence remaining in neutral.
A bit frustrating, yet feels ambivalentic.
The boat, mainly engine bits, keep breaking. The boat requires attending it’s upkeep relentlessly. One thing is fixed, some other, seemingly random thing, will require fixing and so on this goes.
Yes this fixing process is frustrating, maybe particularly since it’s costly and i have never been a diy person to be recommended.
However, it breaks!! When stuff break, don’t the reveal their genuine authenticity? When stuff that supposed to do a certain function works, it’s so easy to forget about it.
We forget the need to fix shoes until water come in. Seems that a tool like a boat, through it’s complexity, can not be treated like shoes. A boat like this is both a tool and constantly between being in need of attention at best, and broken at worst.
Something i think can not be grasped, conceptualized, represented – but spoken with.