Friday, May 18, 2018

Making smoke

Gardner spares 5-mins video

L. Gardner and Sons ceased production of new engines in the early 1990s. They could no longer meet the emission regulations. A plume of grey smoke from the stack of a fishing boat is an evocative sight, but less acceptable in the present day. A number of spinoffs emerged when the factory closed. One of those is Gardner Spares and you can get just about any part within a few days at a reasonable price. So saying, Orion hardly smokes at all. If we've been trolling and then we wind in and wind on for home she'll smoke for a while, but it soon clears; any engine does that.

Winding on after idling

The light plume of smoke from Orion's stack looks a little blue in the photo but that's just the hues of the scene. The colour is actually light grey. I don't have to top up the oil between oil changes which are 200 hours or one year apart whichever comes sooner. That may change as the years go by, but just now she has only 1000 hours on the clock since the re-build; she's barely run-in.


Unsettled May

Lows pushing up from the south

Big savings on fuel this month. A chance to get all those wee jobs done. Like tidying up the engine room after the gearbox repairs and servicing the poo tank. This will give way to a long settled spell we hope. We'll have to see if June and July produce more weekends when we can get out and about. 

Everyone has their favourite weather app but the one that produces the most consistently reliable results for us is MarineWeather