We are celebrating a major achievement here on Thistle. Watch the video. It's pretty funny.
We last ran the generator in Fajardo, Puerto Rico on March 9th, just before we went home to California for two months. When we got back we couldn't get it started. We thought it was the injection pump, so we had it rebuilt there in Puerto Rico, but it still wouldn't run. We decided to continue on to Florida and fix on it there, so we meandered up to the Bahamas using ice to chill our food and the main engine to charge our batteries.
On June 22nd we got a mooring at Sunset Bay Marina in Stuart, Florida, removed the cylinder head, and took it to a machine shop to be rebuilt. It was in pretty nice shape, but they put in three new valves just to be safe. We bolted it onto the engine., but it still wouldn't run.
Digging deeper we discovered that we had very little compression, so we took the whole thing apart and took the block to the machine shop. It took a week for them to figure out how much to bore it out, then we ordered the parts from Westerbeke and that took six weeks. Then another week and a half for the machine shop to actually rebuild the block, and five days for us to put it all back together.
We could do a lot of complaining about the service we received from Westerbeke, but what good would it do? We're just happy that the generator is running again and we can start cruising again.
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