I HATE SHOES

After buying a used filter housing that kinda, sorta fit my engine and spending thirty something dollars on fittings, I threw in the towel on that option for a host of reasons. The weather cleared Friday evening and I had a revelation that I didn't need the hard copper piping since this was all upstream of the injector pump. A trip to West Marine ended in a bulkhead mounted Racor at 2 micron filtration downstream of my existing 30 micron Racor, plumbed to the fuel and injector pumps with flexible hosing. It worked perfectly. Elizabeth came into town on Friday and after picking up some supplies for lunch we were planning to sail to Block Island. When the key was turned and the ignition button pressed however, nothing happened: dead battery. I had read about, and knew I had, a manual crank starting option that I had not attempted before. With Elizabeth at the compression lever and my hands cranking as fast as possible, it started on the second try! By the time we had this sorted an...

I knew full well when I got Soveraine  that the transmission was stuck in forward. I thought it was probably a linkage issue that would be easily fixed. Once that possibility was ruled out, I toyed with the idea of leaving it stuck in forward, since I had throttle control. I would really only need reverse and neutral coming into a dock, and, and in all practicality not even for that. I got to the dock I'm at now slowly coasting in after cutting the engine a few yards before gliding alongside it. No sweat. But, since I have the time, I decided to get it looked at professionally. A friend of all Newport boaters and a lifetime diesel mechanic John Whitney came over to look at it and promptly said it had to come out for him to really diagnose it. He said it probably was just a worn part that needed to be replaced (he even narrowed it down to one or two specific pieces, given an exploded diagram of the reverse gear), not a huge deal, just not something he could do with it sitting in m...