Roger Long
Senior Member
I've read through some old threads on the subject here but would appreciate a selection of the usual wildly divergent opinions to be found on a forum so I can sort through the reasoning to figure out what to do in my particular situation.
We've just completed bringing the 1975 Gulf Star 43 trawler "Gypsy Star" we just purchased from Detroit to Albany. It was an utterly bizarre purchase process followed by one of the best boat trips of my 30,000 nm (or thereabouts) of cruising. This was mostly due to the people involved but the Erie Canal is a wonderful cruising ground and the kind of thing we primarily bought this boat for. However, I'll report on all that later.
The immediate issue:
This boat has twin Perkins 6.354 naturally aspirated engines of mid 70's vintage with only about 2600 hours due to the short seasons in the Great Lakes. She was always a fresh water boat.
The transom around the exhausts is the cleanest I have ever seen. I ran my fingers around the inside of the exhaust pipes at haul out inspection and they came out almost clean. The engines start almost instantly. We have a weak battery that needs to be replaced and, trying to start with that battery, the alarm light was barely glowing and the starter could just kick the engine over about one cylinder stroke but it started right up. We get the usual light grey smoke at fast cruise but never any black. Still no sign of sooting around the outlets after the several hundred miles from Detroit to Albany. Less smoke in general than I have ever seen on a boat.
However, I have several times seen a sheen of fuel oil around the exhausts. Yesterday, we did the Waterford flight of locks which meant a couple hours of idling followed by an hour of cruise at about 1800 rpm to the dock where I dropped off delivery crew. It was embarrassing. The person who picked up our lines at the marina touch and go looked down and said, "You have a lot of fuel coming out of your exhaust." We did. We were making a sheen several feet in diameter and he was obviously not pleased about it. I left hastily.
Reading through other threads, the message that stands out seems to be, "They are Perkins. Get over it." Long idling down through the locks seems like a perfect set up for this scenario. One of my crew who has a lot of diesel experience said he thought he heard the offending engine missing on the run down the river but was not sure. It sounded good to me but I noticed that it seemed harder than usual to get the engines in sync.
We are under a lot of pressure to get this boat moved south as soon as the weather clears up. I'm also reluctant to have the boat disabled at a dock in case one of these storms should come up the Hudson River.
So, the question: Should I just watch and monitor this until we can get south or should I add having a mechanic check it out and probably pull the injectors to the daunting list of things that need to be done before we move on?
We've just completed bringing the 1975 Gulf Star 43 trawler "Gypsy Star" we just purchased from Detroit to Albany. It was an utterly bizarre purchase process followed by one of the best boat trips of my 30,000 nm (or thereabouts) of cruising. This was mostly due to the people involved but the Erie Canal is a wonderful cruising ground and the kind of thing we primarily bought this boat for. However, I'll report on all that later.
The immediate issue:
This boat has twin Perkins 6.354 naturally aspirated engines of mid 70's vintage with only about 2600 hours due to the short seasons in the Great Lakes. She was always a fresh water boat.
The transom around the exhausts is the cleanest I have ever seen. I ran my fingers around the inside of the exhaust pipes at haul out inspection and they came out almost clean. The engines start almost instantly. We have a weak battery that needs to be replaced and, trying to start with that battery, the alarm light was barely glowing and the starter could just kick the engine over about one cylinder stroke but it started right up. We get the usual light grey smoke at fast cruise but never any black. Still no sign of sooting around the outlets after the several hundred miles from Detroit to Albany. Less smoke in general than I have ever seen on a boat.
However, I have several times seen a sheen of fuel oil around the exhausts. Yesterday, we did the Waterford flight of locks which meant a couple hours of idling followed by an hour of cruise at about 1800 rpm to the dock where I dropped off delivery crew. It was embarrassing. The person who picked up our lines at the marina touch and go looked down and said, "You have a lot of fuel coming out of your exhaust." We did. We were making a sheen several feet in diameter and he was obviously not pleased about it. I left hastily.
Reading through other threads, the message that stands out seems to be, "They are Perkins. Get over it." Long idling down through the locks seems like a perfect set up for this scenario. One of my crew who has a lot of diesel experience said he thought he heard the offending engine missing on the run down the river but was not sure. It sounded good to me but I noticed that it seemed harder than usual to get the engines in sync.
We are under a lot of pressure to get this boat moved south as soon as the weather clears up. I'm also reluctant to have the boat disabled at a dock in case one of these storms should come up the Hudson River.
So, the question: Should I just watch and monitor this until we can get south or should I add having a mechanic check it out and probably pull the injectors to the daunting list of things that need to be done before we move on?
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. We had the injectors reconditioned and still get the pretty rainbow at idle as I see it the injector pump runs rich at start up and idle and remember it's old old school technology .
hiding a spill may get you the fine where just reporting a small one probably won't.
