My yacht has broken down!

[patcox2]

One of the engines on my yacht has broken down, and the techs say it will cost $25,000 to replace it!

Can I get a little sympathy? Just a small pity party, please?

[MrCoffee]

1. $25k? A pittance. Why the concern? Take it out of the servant's wage.

[patcox2]

2. What do you take me for, a limousine liberal?

I have a yacht, but no servants, that would go against my egalitarian values.

[MrCoffee]

3. Piffle. You nouveaux riche and your "egalitarian values"

Where's my Grey Poupon?

[patcox2]

6. Oh, sure, its funny to you, but I shall have to sell one of my polo ponies

Really, I am having a bad day, and need some sincere sympathy.

[jmowreader]

8. Y'know, yachting is NOT just a sport for the super rich anymore

The free-advertising-newspaper racks at Food Lions in the Carolinas carry a little book called "Coastal Mariner" which is full of used boats for sale. I get it sometimes. You can find fairly decent yachts for around $1000 per foot--34-foot Bertrams for $34,000, 50-foot Hatterases for $50,000 and like that. You can also find "mechanically sound but butt-ugly" boats for $750 per foot.

If our friend, whose profile lists his hobby as "boats," is a proficient handyman, he could have picked up a 43-footer for around $40,000--there are a LOT of people who have more-expensive motorcycles--and turned it into a fair little cruiser in a couple years' time.

Unfortunately, at the present time, he's also got a big problem: a job he can't undertake by himself because you get a diesel engine out of a yacht with a crane, and he hasn't got one. Which sucks. I feel for ya.

[azmouse]

4. I hate it when that happens!

:P

[Blue-Jay]

5. Just have the mechanic transfer the engine out of your Bentley.

No, not the good one; the other one that you don't drive very often.

[jmowreader]

7. Do the other one at the same time

Dude, what the hell did you DO to so completely trash an engine that they've got to replace it? (That is, unless you're running Cats, and then it's understandable: Cat 3200-series engines are disposable. But geeze, man, destroying a 6-71 is like breaking an anvil. I saw a 4-71--same engine with two fewer cylinders--throw a rod and not destroy the block.)

But I'm serious. Pull both engines and replace them with a matched pair of either MTU Series 60s or Cat C7s. There's three reasons for it:

Reason 1: if one engine died, the other is destined to die in the very near future. They're in the same boat with the same sailor at the helm, which means they get the same fuel, run in the same water and get the same maintenance. And it's a hell of a lot less expensive to do both engines in one visit to the yard instead of two. (Also consider the abuse you're going to heap on your new engine when, after the old one croaks, you have to run from the middle of the ocean back to port on one screw.)

Reason 2: all new engines have electronic fuel injection, there's a control panel for the EFI system that goes up in the helm--and, right now, the cable that runs between the engine and the control panel is not in your boat. They can fish both cables at the same time and save you some more money.

Reason 3: new engines burn less fuel and emit less pollution, both good liberal things.

Also have the props checked to make sure the new engines are simpatico with your existing screws. Sometimes they're not.

If you DO have Detroits in there now, you're gonna be even unhappier: The Series 71 Detroit has an accessory gearbox on the back of it to power your hydraulic pumps and shit like that; that gearbox ain't on a four-stroke diesel, so you'll have to retrofit your hydraulic pump.