One Stubborn Hunk of Metal!

Today involved a lot of this; lying in the quarter berths and contorting ourselves into the back of the engine bay to disconnect everything! Those legs belong to my long-suffering Dad, who generously spent a day off work getting covered in oil and grease with me instead of relaxing or doing anything sensible like that.

I've spent the last two days fighting with an engine which really didn't want to come out of this little boat. The current engine is an extremely old, extremely rusty Yanmar 2QM15. It's been wedged in there and just barely fits, giving the boat about double the horsepower that it really needs. Over the years the various sensors and warning lights have succumbed to the effects of time and salt water but it will take more than that to kill the engine block itself. So it runs, usually, in between bouts of diesel airlocks and electrical issues. Right now it's not running, as the air filter has disintegrated and I think a chunk of it is stuck in one of the intake valve seats. So before the engine goes back into service it needs to come out and be overhauled, cleaned up and painted. 

The engine before we went near it. Note the almost complete lack of space to turn a spanner at the sides of the engine. I suspect that the engine may have been placed in position before the deck moulding was added, because trying to lift it over the studs holding the engine mounts in position turned out to be a total mission because the clearance above it was virtually zero!

We won the battle in the end! Now the engine is sitting in position ready to be lifted out of the companionway, as soon as I figure out exactly what I want to do with it. 

When it's working it's great to have the option to go straight upwind at four or five knots regardless of the conditions, and obviously it's very handy to have the engine for getting in and out of marinas. However, something attracts me to the idea of cruising engineless. There's no better boat for learning the arts of surviving on a sailboat without an auxiliary motor, and it's something I've been working on over the last few years. As it is the engine only comes on if the wind dies or if I need to get into a particularly awkward marina berth. Without the engine there would be no more worries about breakdowns, availability of spare parts, fuel levels, stressing about needing the engine to make it to port for a certain deadline or tidal window. All balanced against the comfort and safety factor of having the engine there to use when it's needed, and always being able to charge the batteries at the push of a button. The fact that I don't have the facilities or equipment to easily do the overhaul job myself is also a factor to consider. So while I haven't 100% decided to ditch the motor, the engine is currently up for sale and I am thinking hard about it.