1000 miles and we’re ten yards from where we started.

This afternoon Mike the Mechanic from Port Annapolis Marina came out to the Picaroon where she was anchored in Back Creek to look at the engine. The good news is that he’s not that worried about the white smoke, which is probably a cooling water issue of some kind. The bad news is not really much of anything: the engine mounts need to be replaced, which we’ll do before we leave Annapolis, and that’s more or less it.

Except for one thing: I was futzing with the engine stop cable (which is really hard to pull and needs to be moved closer to the engine) when I noticed that the governor–which controls speed on a diesel, like a throttle on a gasolene engine–doesn’t go all the way forward. HB’s dad had commented a couple of times that the engine is anæmic (he’s American, so he said anemic), which he’d put down to it being all old and busted. We’d found that a bolt in the binnacle was preventing the throttle lever from going all the way forward and fixed that, but it still doesn’t go further forward than just over halfway. The cable bracket needs to be repositioned. Caveat: engine may still suck monkeynuts after this is fixed–we’ll see, but I’m hopeful this might mean a much more powerful engine.

In other engine news, the new alternator fan arrived, so we won’t have to run the engine forever to charge the batteries. Of course, now we are plugged into shore power: QUICK! TURN ON ALL THE LIGHTS AND LET’S WATCH MOVIES ALL NIGHT!!!