We interrupt this broadcast…

My last post was covering our trip north. It was part two of three, and my intention was to spend several posts getting caught up to real time. I’m still going to cover the rest of the trip north and the trip south to date, but we’ve had an unexpected interruption so I’m going to “live blog” for the next week or so before going back to playing catch up.

Several days ago I heard a new knocking sound in our engine. It wasn’t very noticeable and I thought I was imagining things, so I didn’t mention it to Jeff. He has since reminded me that he’s getting hard of hearing, so always say something.

On Sunday we were anchored just south of the ICW on Winyah Bay in South Carolina. The plan was to head down the ICW and be in Beaufort, SC eating tomato pie today (Tuesday).

About 15 minutes after we began, we increased the throttle to pass a smaller, slower boat in front of us. As we were passing, I could hear the revs on the engine starting to search. It took a minute or two before Jeff could hear it. We passed the other boat, brought the throttle down, and now the knocking from a few days ago became louder so that Jeff started to hear it too.

We radioed SV Infinity to let them know we were having issues and decided to turn around (he told us later that he could hear our engine through the VHF which wasn’t typical.) Within a minute of turning around, the revs really started hunting, the knocking was really loud (we think – there was a lot going on), and the engine stopped. Uh-oh.

We told SV Infinity what was up and started drifting with the current (there wasn’t any wind) while we talked about our options. Of course the current eventually started to turn us towards the center of the channel, so Infinity came up and within 30 seconds we had a line tied between the boats and he was slowly towing us.

It took awhile to reach TowBoat (they weren’t answering the radio and we didn’t have cell service), but eventually they arrived and towed us to the only marina in Georgetown, SC that had space. SV Infinity arrived about an hour after us.

To make a long story short, we had a mechanic come in yesterday (Monday). He listened to the engine for ten seconds and promptly declared it was a broken wrist pin and we would need a new engine, because the labor to rebuild would approach the cost of a new engine. Keep in mind, in 2018 we had a new Beta 16 HP installed (at great expense) to avoid this very situation. It has almost 2,800 hours on it, and you should easily get 10,000 hours out of one. This was NOT what we expected to hear.

After the shock wore off we decided to get a second opinion. We really didn’t get a good hit off the guy and had the distinct feeling he just didn’t want to do the job, whatever that job might turn out to be. A few people from Facebook had recommended him, but he deals primarily in large, expensive sport fishing boats with standing headroom engine rooms that are larger than the main living area of Pegu Club. Our boat most definitely does not have that kind of an engine room. Boat yoga is involved to work on it. Besides, we would never take just one mechanic’s opinion when we’re talking about something that massive. That would be like having a random car mechanic say your car needs a new engine. You’d go to another mechanic.

There is a Beta dealer in Mt. Pleasant SC, right by Charleston – Zimmerman’s. We figured we’d get a tow there and have them take a look. That’s when we found out that BoatUS’s Gold unlimited towing package isn’t really unlimited away from your home port. It used to be, but now Geico owns it. We can only get a free tow for up to 25 miles, after that they’ll pay 50% up to $3,000. To give you an idea of towing fees, the TowBoat in Georgetown, SC charges $180/hour. We have about 58 miles to go, at approximately 7 miles an hour. Do the math (and don’t forget he needs to go 58 miles back).

Infinity has offered to tow us the entire way, but we don’t want him to do that. Fortunately, it’s a sailboat and today we have a bit of wind. We’re going to ghost to an anchorage not too far away (we’ll need Infinity to tow for about 5 miles where the trees will be blocking the wind.) We’ll wait out the blow tomorrow at the anchorage, then on Thursday and Friday there will be enough wind to sail down the ICW, thereby getting us within 25 miles of the Charleston TowBoat where we can get a free tow.

We’ll have a mechanic look at the boat on Monday morning and see where we go from there. At this point, having received input from various cruising friends, we figure it’s either going to be something simple and we should be quickly on our way, or it will be catastrophic. Keep your fingers crossed! I’ll post daily dispatches to keep readers up to date.