Spark plug wires - how boring is that?

Throughout this season, we noticed just a little miss in our starboard engine. Nothing major, but you could see it on the sync gauge. That engine would drop a few RPMs every once in a while. As the season went on, this became more frequent and by the time we took friends to Mystic a few weeks ago, it became a major problem that was resulting in increased fuel usage.

Time to fix it, and we focused on the plug wires because when the engine idled, we could hear a snapping sound and that sounded like spark.

The plug wires weren't that old. We installed them about six years ago and didn't replace them when we rebuilt the heads on that engine two winters ago. They looked good and aren't these things made out of long-lasting, space-age material?  Apparently not.

We had Packard Delecore II, 7-mm wires on that engine. On Chrysler marine 318 and 360 engines, they run from the distributor down between the heads and the exhaust manifold ports to the plugs. No matter how you try to secure them, that puts most of the wires in contact with the very hot manifolds and in our case, one or more of them failed.

We called http://www.marineengineparts.com/ our favorite supplier, and the guy who answered the phone confessed that 1980 Chrysler engines where "a little before his time." We coached him to sell us a plug wire set for big block GM engine, thinking that they would be longer, and they were. In fact, the new Magstar 801 8-mm wires were at least four inches longer than the old wires that were intended for our Chrysler engines.

On Saturday, we installed the new plug wires, running them outside of the exhaust manifolds so there is no contact between the plug wires and the manifolds. The engine started perfectly and ran without the old stumble. We'll put another set of these Magstar wires on the port engine this winter.

Pooka's health emergency

About two weeks ago, Pooka got sick. He was weak and obviously, something was very wrong. Frances rushed him to the animal hospital in nearby Marlborough where he was found to "shutting down" with a very low temperature. That's not good for cats and the Vet treated him, which included putting him in a incubator to bring his temperature back up. He was also tested for several important bodily functions and those tests came back as okay. In about five days and $800 in treatment costs, Pooka, the boat cat, came back to his summer home, apparently well again.

Pooka is an important member of our crew. It's great to see him back and home.

Just to show us that he was fully recovered, he climbed to the steps to the fly bridge and, for the first time, climbed back down without assistance. Go Pooka!

Frances cooked one of our favorite dinners while Pooka and I watched. It may be getting cold, but boating is still good.

Summer is definitely over

 We turned on the heat in the boat one night last weekend, just 12 hours or so after the temperature at the dock had been up to 80 degrees. A 40 degree change in temperature in one day really gets your attention, but that's New England weather. Unfortunately, that means that we have to begin planning to move the boat back to Portland, Connecticut for winter storage. That will probably take place in mid-October.

Even though the autumn weather can be beautiful, we really have to be careful. Several years ago, we went up at the end of October and when we went back to the boat the next day to winterize the engines, we had eight inches of wet snow on the boat. We learned the hard way that fly bridge enclosures aren't meant to support the weight of that much wet snow.