Still discovering weird stuff on a boat

I was going to break my long blog silence with a few more thoughts on our first real trip out on the boat without any supervision.  Just Alice and I at the wheel!

But the weirdest thing happened yesterday so I'm going to preempt that story for a day.

Our bilge was filling up like crazy with fresh water.  The pumps were mostly keeping up with it, but it is technically pretty dangerous and could sink your boat.

So I went looking for the leak which seemed to be somewhere in the fresh water plumbing. I figured it would be hard to find because everything is hard to find down there and it's usually some obscure little leak or crack in a pipe.

But actually it was super easy to find. Because it was squirting like a huge fountain everywhere! But the bizarre part is that it was squirting from the Overflow of the cooling fluid from the starboard engine. This makes absolutely no sense. Why would fresh water become flowing into the engine. It uses sea water to cool it, and that only happens when the engines actually running.

Then it got even stranger. The engine was actually a little warm. This is crazy because the engine had not been running for several days. The other engine on the port side, was cool to touch. But the starboard was pretty warm. I began to suspect some kind of electrochemical scary issue, and went out in the dark looking for someone who knew what they were doing to ask. I found Francis the guy who's a boat broker who knows pretty much everything about them, and I told him my symptoms. He looked at me for a minute and thought and then said oh, your hot water heater is broken.

How in the world could that be? What does your hot water heater have to do with the starboard engine? Well it turns out that we have a feature on our boat which is actually fairly common to many other boats. It's a way to have hot water for a shower even when you're out to sea. The water runs from whatever the freshwater source is either a tank or from the dock into the hot water heater then out to the engine and then back from the engine into the hot water heater. It's only meant to be used when the engines are running in the electricity is off. Apparently some corrosion happened or some solenoid failed which force the valve to remain open to the engine I was literally pumping my engine full of freshwater.

Anyway, it took me awhile to figure it out but I had an idea what to do to fix it and then got my friend Bill to come and help. He actually volunteered when he came on the boat to say hello. I was grateful for that because I'm very leery of unhooking stuff down there without another pair of eyes. But we were able to reroute the outbound hose from the water heater back into the inbound part of the hot water heater bypassing the engine entirely. This stopped the leak. I have to do the same thing on the engine side of the loop and then refill the engine coolant with coolant instead of just plain water.

Now I have to decide if I'm going to replace the hot water heater so I can keep this function, or just live without it. I have a generator, so technically I don't necessarily need to use that method, but that's a whole other story which I will include in the description of our first trip as independent Mariners.