After a quick delivery job this morning for Western Yacht Commissioning we broke free of the Silver Gate Yacht club that has been our home for the past three weeks. 

For a bit of a history here, we ran the engine numeroius times before leaving today.  We ran it in gear, in the slip and nothing bad happened.   Sure the shaft packing dripped a little more than I preffered,  but nothing major.  So everything was going well enroute to the Laurel Street mooring field.  I noticed a lot of water filling up the overflow bottle.  This fun fact means there is a hole in our heat exchanger. 

When there is a hole in the heat exchanger salt water and fresh water mix in the engine.  Niki was driving and doing a fine job as I walked around checking this and that.  Standing at the taff rail I noticed some steam mixed with our exhaust.

So down below I went to check our engine again.  Guess what I saw?  I'll tell you, I saw the end of a 1 1/4 inch oil cooler pumping sea water into our boat.  I bolted up to the helm and had Niki shut off the engine.  Now we were mid channel in the San Diego bay.

I tried to sort out a fix, but the only hose we had was some 1 1/2 inch hose that I'm using to re hose the cockpit drains.  It just wasn't going to work.  Our skiff was already in the water so I tied it off to our starboard quarter and away we wnt at 2.5 knots.

We called in Joe and Julie for some assistance onto our mooring.  The sketchy part, I felt was going to be stopping the boat.  We had a light tail wind and kept on trucking along at 1 knot well after I had shut the motor off in the skiff.

Now everything is calm and cool being in our element.   I guess I will have to attend to the engine sooner than later.