While we are not constantly making engine room checks, what we
DO do is have a little oven timer at the helm set to five minutes.* It counts down five minutes and starts to beep.* It's not super-loud, startling, or irritating, it's just a fairly quiet chirping.* This alerts us to check all the engine, electrical, and exhaust instruments at which point we hit the timer button which resets it to five minutes and it counts down again.* We got this idea from two places.* One of them was Carey, who did the same thing.*
The other was from a railroad in Australia that has a line across western Australia to the coast.* This line includes the longest straight stretch of track in the world and there is nothing but sand and sticker-bushes clear to the horizon.* The locomotives have manually set timers in them that go off every three minutes or so.* If the engineer doesn't physically reset the timer within a certain number of seconds the throttle goes to idle and the brakes are applied on the train.* This part of the line is so numbingly boring--- same as running a trawler at cruise speed
--- that this system was devised to preven the engine crew from dozing off.
It's very easy to get distracted when running a boat.* We took the autopilot off our boat when we bought it but even when steering manually it's easy to get into watching the scenery or wildlife or talking to guests or looking for debris in the water.* So it's easy to let long periods of time go by without looking at the gauges.* The little oven timer works great as a reminder.
I'm a big fan of analog instument displays as opposed to digital displays because an analog display (needle on a dial) indicates trends without having to read any numbers.* A previous owner of our boat did a clever thing, and that was to put thin strips of electrical tape on every instrument (except the tachs) indicating the instrument's normal reading.* All the temp, pressure, amp, volt, and EGT gauges have these little strips of tape marking the normal readings.* So checking the instruments consists of one quick scan to make sure all the needles are in the vicinity of the tape marks.* There is no need to read any numbers.
If a needle is not near its tape mark, then it warrants a closer look and corrective action of some sort if in fact a non-normal condition exists.
-- Edited by Marin on Friday 17th of December 2010 03:41:53 PM