We’re (mostly) adjusted to the new reality.

I’ll admit, morale was very low on the Pegu Club on Friday and Saturday. We went through all the stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression. And now we’ve reached the stage of acceptance. No surprise that Jeff reached it first, but I went for a five mile walk yesterday and came back with a clear head and a good perspective.

The main thing that helped was knowing that we are in a position to do this. Yes, it’s a big hit to our savings, and we will take next winter off to work and fatten up the cruising kitty again, but this definitely won’t force us to swallow the anchor. There are shoe-string cruisers where an engine replacement would mean game over plus now they have a boat they can’t sell. Fortunately, that isn’t the case for us.

Now it’s basically a waiting game, with the time spent making many decision. Decision 1: repair the engine or get a new one. On the surface, it would seem that repair would be the way to go. But dig a little deeper, and it’s not as simple.

The engine has to be removed and then reinstalled either way: repair or replace. If we go the repair route, then the mechanic has to dig in and see if it’s a bearing or the wrist-pin, and see what kind of damage it may have done. We already know that there are flecks of metal on the oil dipstick. At the hourly labor rate, a mechanic could easily spend half the cost of a new engine (or more) diagnosing and repairing – assuming it can be repaired at all. The damage could be too great. So do we roll the dice, knowing at the end we have an engine that’s out of warranty with five+ year old parts?

If we go the replace route, we could strip the current engine of a variety of parts that will need to be replaced in the future: starter, alternator, water pump, heat exchanger, basically brand new injectors, etc. and keep them for when those parts break down in the future. No, they aren’t new parts (well, the alternator basically is and the injectors certainly are), but buying all of the potential replacement parts would easily exceed $2,000. Replace it, and we’ll have a new engine with a five year warranty and a bunch of spares.

Decision 2: buy a complete engine or a long-block. We didn’t know it before this happened, but apparently you can buy an engine that is basically just the core. Then you transfer the other parts (listed above) from your old engine onto the new one. The long-block is $2,300 cheaper, but then you’re paying labor to transfer everything and you don’t have the older spare parts, so we’d need to buy new spare parts.

They key factor for us when it came to decisions 1 and 2 was the fact that the long-block would be shipped from England so it would take “approximately” four weeks to arrive. The new engine is in stock. Given all of that, we decided to go with the new one and strip the consumables from the old engine ourselves, giving us a chance to learn how to remove those items and save on labor costs.

So we’ve put a hold on the new engine and saved some money on the cost of it by purchasing it without the transmission, the exhaust elbow, the mounts, and the alternator. Our alternator was replaced in May in Saint Augustine, so it’s virtually new. All of those items can be moved from our current engine. We also don’t need a control panel since our current one is fine.

Beta has given us a multi-engine discount of 20%, and the total cost is around $1,000 more than the engine we purchased in late 2017. Given inflation since then, that’s not bad. But it doesn’t feel like a “we’re sorry this happened” price. At this point though, we’re arguing over speculation. We haven’t given up on getting a larger discount once we have a better idea as to what exactly went wrong.

The next decision (decision 3) was whether or not to try to remove the old engine and install the new one ourselves. Ultimately we decided that for the good of our psyches and our relationship, we should leave this one to the mechanics and take the diesel courses in Annapolis later this year. Jeff might try observe while the mechanic works and pick up some knowledge that way.

Decision four is where to get the work done. We posted on some Facebook pages for some referrals, and we’ve narrowed it down to here in Charleston or a bit farther south in Thunderbolt, near Savannah. If we were going to tackle this ourselves, we’d probably go even farther south towards St. Marys or Brunswick. But we’re not, so that helped. We’re waiting on quotes from a few places and will base our decision on cost and how quickly it can get done, but right now we’re leaning strongly towards Thunderbolt.

We already know that we can’t get hauled out in Charleston until late next week. If we choose Thunderbolt, we’ll have to sail outside to get there and we don’t have a weather window for that until Friday at the earliest. So either way, for now we wait.