Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Can we do this?” whispered Hatsumi.

  “They’re friends,” I said. And they proved to be, again, pulling us down into the warmth of the cave of the cabin, where a daughter and son-in-law were helping finish off the remains of dinner. Cookies and tea materialized.

  “We thought you’d be long gone,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Dave. “Water pump. Started dribbling just after we left you. It hasn’t gotten any worse, but it hasn’t gotten any better either. And I don’t fancy losing my engine. I ordered a new part.”

  “Which came today,” added the son-in-law.

  “But it was the wrong one,” finished Dave. “Another one is supposed to be coming tomorrow. I’m going over to Port McNeill to pick it up.”

  “If it comes,” said the son-in-law.

  Nobody seemed much perturbed. “We’ll be over there too, tomorrow.” I explained about Chris. Dave just nodded; outside, the wind whined in Sanctum’s, rigging and the boat fretted against her fenders. But I felt better.

  Sometime that night, the wind blew itself out. When I slid the hatch open the next morning, the sun was just climbing up behind the comical wheelhouse of the tug beside us. The black and white tabby padded over to the tug and vanished. The groaning, shifting dock of the night before had become solid again. It was going to be a beautiful day, even if we were about to turn back.

  “At least our water pump isn’t leaking,” I called down to Hatsumi, who was boiling water in the galley. “I should probably do an engine check, though. Won’t be a minute.”

  Vera is unusual, for a sailboat, in that you can actually get at the engine from the top. I unscrewed the bronze fasteners in the cockpit floor and lifted the heavy inspection hatch.

  “Oh, fucking hell.”

  “What? What?”

  “Fucking, fucking hell.” I lowered the hatch again and screwed it firmly in place. “Now we really have to go back to Port McNeill. I hope they have a good mechanic there.”

  The engine compartment looked as though someone, some gremlin, had soaked a rag in engine oil and whirled it gleefully around its head. There was a splash circle of oil that went up the sides of the boat and down into the bilge. It looked a little like Saturn’s rings. The epicentre seemed to be at the driveshaft coupling, which I’d fixed just before we departed from Victoria. Or thought I’d fixed. Only a day before, I’d been imagining my father’s feelings when the shunt he’d inserted in Billy had to be removed. The mess in my engine compartment was the maritime equivalent: fluids where they weren’t supposed to be.

  “Can we move?” said Hatsumi.

  “We have to,” I said. “It’s only thirty minutes to the other side. We can get parts there, everything. We’ll be right at home.”

  Then I remembered Phil.

  Leaks

  This latest breakdown wasn’t the first time I’d been reminded of the weird parallels between boating and brain surgery. A few months before we had set out on the trip, as the weather softened and the lists of provisions and contacts lengthened, Vera had developed hydrocephalus. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. I was on my knees in front of the engine, doing a routine check for loose connections, suspicious-looking hoses, horrifying black lakes of oil. Instead, I found seawater beneath the engine, not a lot, but there shouldn’t have been any. I traced the rivulet up the cold grey metal of the engine block, under the fixed-up water pump, and toward the radiator, feeling for moisture like a doctor palpating a chain of lymph glands. The moisture started at the seawater inlet to the heat exchanger. The cooling system had sprung a leak.

  Most modern marine inboard engines have two complete fluid circulation pathways, one seawater and the other fresh. Only the fresh water actually penetrates the engine and cools it, before passing the heat to a separate stream of cold seawater. The hand-off happens in the heat exchanger, a honeycomb of tubes (full of seawater) surrounded by a bath of antifreeze. It’s elegant — just like in the cerebrospinal fluid circulation of the brain, an inner and an outer system fitted together — but, like the cerebrospinal system, it’s prone to leaks and blockages. Sometimes, antifreeze or seawater gets loose; sometimes, the cooling tubes get blocked up with salts and the engine overheats. Based on my examination, my engine might have both problems. I could hear my father.

  “This is going to be really expensive.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “I thought you were dead.” This was the second time he’d piped up. The first had been in Baynes Channel, as we spun helplessly in the current.

  “You’re going to have to operate. And you need a second opinion.”

  He was right. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. Even wrestling the heat exchanger off would need two people, and removing such a big chunk of an engine is really only exploratory surgery. You will find something frightening inside. Knowing this, I called Chris, for whom “been sailing all my life” is actually true. Chris, it may fairly be said, loves boat engines.

  “I can’t even get the bolts loose to look inside,” I told him. “Stripped, rusted, you name it.”

  “Ho! ” he said. “We’ll have to take it off!” He sounded delighted.

  “It’s big,” I said. “I think it connects to the exhaust system too.”

  “All of it! Off! Where are you?”

  “On my knees in front of it.”

  “I’ll bring my biggest wrench.”

  Chris and I blowtorched rusted bolts loose, knifed off mushy rubber hoses, drained lurid green antifreeze that looked like alien blood, and finally had the whole mess out on the dock. It looked like the aftermath of an accident between very old vehicles. The heat exchanger itself was fine, needing nothing more than a new set of rubber seals; the “something frightening” turned out to be the exhaust elbow, a cast-iron cocked arm that twenty-five years of seawater had turned into a pitted, russet lump. It was quite attractive, in an artistic kind of way. When we put it in the vice and leaned hard on the wrench, the quarter-inch-thick cast iron cracked like a dried-out wooden bowl.

  “That’s a shame,” said Chris. “At least it didn’t happen while you were in Johnstone Strait. What was the name of that Yanmar dealer?”

  “Willi,” I said.

  Willi’s replacement elbow was $379.

  “Cast iron is hopeless anyway,” said Chris. “We’ll make one out of stainless steel.”

  To get this far — parts strewn around my basement and Chris’s shop, the engine stripped, rags stuffed in its exhaust ports — would already have cost several thousand dollars if I’d taken the problem to a shop. Now we were contemplating a custom-built stainless steel exhaust. Chris began to doodle a design on a piece of paper, like the upraised arm of a Balinese dancer. He handed me a list of parts.

  “These two” — he pointed to a connection at the top, a small stovepipe where the water would be injected — “have to be TIG welded. Take them down to Leach Machine Works.” He tossed the old elbow into the garbage.

  “It was bound to fail, you know.”

  Over the next week, I cleaned, buffed, and painted the heat exchanger and drove around town looking for stainless steel elbows, sleeves, and nipples, pacing myself so as not to get ahead of the daily design refinements that Chris was coming up with. He kept changing his mind.

  “Better make that an eight-inch hose nipple,” he would say. A nipple is a piece of pipe with male threads on each end. They didn’t resemble any nipples I’d ever seen.

  “And some nice anti-rust paint.” Only Chris says things like nice anti-rust paint. “Your engine is disgusting.”

  “You want me to paint my engine?”

  “Scrub it with solvent first. Use a toothbrush. I’ll lend you my compressor to blow it dry before you paint. Just think, all that grease and rust gone. It’ll be lovely!”

  I couldn’t paint my engine until it stopped raining. Instead, I drove out to see Willi and co
llect as many gaskets and hoses as he could provide. The rows of yachts tied up outside his shop looked miserable, their decks stained green with winter’s inevitable algae.

  “How was Patagonia?” I asked when I stepped in out of the rain.

  “Like this,” Willi said, gesturing at the rain running down the window. “Weather was the shits.” He cracked open the thumb-smudged Yanmar parts list and led me into the inner sanctum where his stock was kept. For an ordinary person, it was an ordinary place: racks, boxes, things dangling. For someone whose engine was in pieces and who couldn’t afford to pay a repairman, it was dangerously exciting. Hundreds of fan belts hung from hooks in the walls, and the ceiling was festooned with refurbished bronze propellers, their blades whorled from the polishing wheel. Cardboard boxes held gaskets of every conceivable size, like stencils created by a madman. The one I needed was $25. Willi found an old plastic container and threw in the parts as he located them: O-rings, rubber seals, copper washers. Now Willi’s voice came from within a cardboard box, where he was rapidly flipping through plastic sleeves of gaskets, like a librarian going through an old-fashioned card catalogue.

  “What about that elbow, you gonna buy the new one?”

  “Making one out of stainless,” I said.

  Willi emerged and gave me a long look. “Oh, ya,” he said. “Good idea.”

  The last stop before reassembly was the machine shop where the parts would be welded together. “What’s TIG welding?” I asked.

  “Tungsten Inert Gas.” The guy was in his twenties, in a green shop suit and lip ring.

  “Well, can you tungsten-inert-gas these?” I held up an elbow and a small section of pipe.

  He took the pieces behind a curtain of vinyl drapes and reached for his welding helmet. I looked around Leach Machine Works. Another young guy was setting up a chunk of metal in a milling machine, adjusting clamps and taking measurements with calipers. There were three other massive metal-working machines in the shop, one of them the largest lathe I had ever seen, not quite as long as Vera but close. The chuck alone — the rotating clamp that holds the piece of metal being spun and shaved — was as big across as a bicycle wheel and eight inches thick. “Made in Czechoslovakia,” the smudged nameplate said.

  While the first guy welded and the second fiddled with his clamps and calipers, I nosed around. The world is full of machine shops like Leach’s, places where you can turn a driveshaft on a monstrous metal lathe or weld a trivial little spigot onto a stainless elbow — and everything in between. I wandered into the cluttered office and was pleased to see an adding machine in the middle of the desk. The man at the desk wore coveralls, like everyone else.

  “Do you get many people dropping in with stupid little projects like this?” I waved toward the flickering light at the welding station.

  “All the time,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a pain, yeah, but basically we like people coming in with odd jobs. Keeps us connected, you know? That was the way my dad always did business.”

  “So this is a family operation?”

  “Four brothers,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the shop. I poked my head outside again: the man at the milling machine did look a lot like the person I was talking to.

  “Dad sold it to us. We pay for it in instalments, so it funds his retirement.”

  Four brothers, all sorted out by a father who seemed to have known exactly what he was doing. And my own father couldn’t get even one of his three children interested in medicine.

  At the milling machine, the job had finally gotten under way, the spinning cutter eating steadily into the solid metal that one of the Leach brothers advanced carefully into the path of the blade, each hand caressing a knurled knob that moved the work left or right, up or down. A continuous jet of cooling water drenched the point of contact and flowed down over the work into a collecting pan beneath. A shiny helix of metal grew out of a tendril of smoke and dropped to the floor, joining thousands of other waste metal coils that gave the place an after-the-ball look. A window slid open above the office and a man in green coveralls and a ball cap grinned and waved at me with an apple. Another brother?

  When the vinyl curtains parted again and my exhaust elbow emerged from its trial by fire, it was still warm. A bomb-proof bead of stainless steel cemented the two parts.

  “Are you happy?” I asked the guy who had welded it.

  “I am. It’ll last forever.”

  “It’s for a boat,” I said.

  “That’s different.” We both laughed.

  Reassembly was anticlimactic. New exhaust system, new hoses, new O-rings, bolts, and clamps, and new antifreeze — everything drew together like those movies of exploding buildings run in reverse.

  “Aren’t you going to fire it up?” asked Chris. He peeled off his overalls.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  I turned the key. The engine snuffled, cleared its throat, and hoicked seawater out the stern as though nothing had happened. Vera was fixed, for now.

  Mechanics

  An hour after discovering the oil leak, we were back on the dock in Port McNeill. This looked like a no-brainer. Oil in a circular pattern came from something that was spinning. The only candidate was the driveshaft — except that I’d pulled the coupler apart two months before and cleaned out all the gunk. Mind you, I’d paid a mechanic in Victoria to put it back together because I didn’t have the special tool needed. But how difficult was it to tighten four bolts?

  I picked up the phone to call the mechanic who’d done the job, and it rang in my hand.

  “Don’t come back.” It was Chris. “Absolutely not.”

  “But I thought . . .”

  “A little rot in the bilge? Ha! We’ve already got an appointment with another oncologist, in Vancouver. I’m fine, never felt better. Finish your trip.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “No buts.”

  “I mean, we can’t finish our trip. Not until I get the engine going again.”

  “Now that sounds interesting. Tell me everything, but quickly. We have to leave for Vancouver. I’ll think about it on the way.”

  Next, I called the mechanic in Victoria.

  “Impossible,” he said. “No way oil can come out of that coupling.”

  “But it is!” I said. “You owe me a little time on this one!” I had paid him four hundred dollars.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  Port McNeill was full of fishing boats. They all had diesel engines. I buttonholed a water taxi operator and scribbled down two names he gave me. When I called, both were booked solid.

  “A week, maybe more,” said one. “Or you could try Phil, over at the chandlery. He’s got a mechanic.”

  Phil.

  It was Friday. Phil was terribly busy. He didn’t show any sign of remembering me or the thousand dollars I’d spent in his store a few days before. If anything, the place looked even more chaotic. I insisted.

  “Come with me,” he said. I trotted into a loading bay. Time sheets were fixed to the wall. Phil stabbed one with his finger. “Booked solid. See?”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “Come here.” Phil led me back to the service counter and picked up the phone. He stared into space and narrowed his eyes, as though there might be another diesel mechanic hiding behind a ceiling tile.

  “Look,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got a gentleman here, his engine’s throwin’ oil off the ass end. Gotta be the seal needs replacing. You’ll have to drop the transmission.”

  “It’s not the seal! There’s a brand new seal in it!” I bleated. Phil put down the phone. He continued to look over my head.

  “My guy doesn’t work Saturday. But he’s making a concession. Eight thirty tomorrow, at the dock-head.”

  The woman who manned the cash register approached and tu
gged at Phil’s sleeve.

  “What?” he said.

  Dave arrived later in the day on the ferry from Sointula, and I walked with him to the parcel depot, which was in the lobby of a motel at the top of a steep climb. I sat outside on the curb and watched the ferry inch back to Sointula. Dave came out empty-handed.

  “I guess it was too much to hope for,” he said as we trudged back down the hill. He didn’t seem fazed by the prospect of spending half his holiday waiting for an engine part. Clearly this was someone I could learn from, on many levels. When Dave thought something was funny, he let you know, but in a sideways fashion. Loud laughter or lamentation seemed equally foreign to him as though, after a lifetime spent moving people and their things around the coast, anything can happen was something he felt in his bones.

  “I had a friend once,” he said, as though reading my thoughts, “he used the phrase, eagerly awaiting the next disaster.”

  “What happened to him?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Lost him to cancer,” Dave said, as though reading my thoughts again. He left on the next ferry.

  The wind rose again in late afternoon. A sister ship, identical to Vera but much newer, entered the harbour and tied up a few fingers away. The owners found me staring morosely at our greasy engine.

  “I admire you,” the man said. He was shivering, in a red Port Townsend hoodie. He looked like a miserable goblin.

  “We had a terrible time getting here,” said his wife. They were both in their mid-thirties; she had the lean, pinched look of a dedicated runner. But not a sailor, apparently.

  “The wind was horrible, on the nose all the way. Are you guys going around the island too?”

  “If I can fix the engine,” I said.

  “That’s why I admire you,” said the man. “I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d probably call 911.”

  “Would you mind sailing along with my husband?” the woman asked. “He has no mechanical skills.”