We’re counting down the days until we cast off for our summer trip to revisit the San Juan Islands and then venture farther north than we’ve ever been under sail, hopefully, all the way to Desolation Sound in British Columbia.
This will be our most extended trip by far since we’ve owned Indiscretion, and we’ve been busy readying the little ship for the journey. Most of this work has been preventive maintenance on the engines and visual checks on the vast array of systems aboard the boat. We use a cloud-based vessel maintenance tool called Wheelhouse Technologies to help tell us what needs to be done. When we took ownership of the boat last July, there were over a hundred open maintenance tasks to complete. I’ve slowly whittled that down to a manageable handful, but with a complex yacht like a Nordhavn, you’re never “done” with maintenance. It’s an ongoing affair. But I sure like having a tool like Wheelhouse to keep on top of all this.
One of the last items on our punch list before the trip was an engine oil and filter change on the Yanmar 3YM30 wing engine. This is our “get home” engine in the event our main engine fails for some reason. The Yanmar has its own feathering prop and fuel tank which should allow us to drive the boat even if the main engine’s prop is fouled or the fuel in our main tank is contaminated.
Changing the oil and filter should easy for me since I maintained a similar Yanmar engine on our cruising sailboat for almost over a decade. And Indiscretion has a Reverso oil changing pump system which makes draining the oil from engines almost a push-button affair.
The difficulty arose when I tried to connect the Reverso oil changing pump to the Yanmar engine. On the main engine and generator, the oil change system is plumbed directly to the respective crankcases. With the wing engine, there is just a hose coiled near the engine that looks like this:
There is a 1/2″ fitting on the end of the hose, but I couldn’t find anywhere on the engine where this attaches. Huh. Oh well, I thought. I’ll extract the oil the old fashioned way with a hand pump and hose inserted down the dipstick. Later I brought down my manual oil change pump and discovered the dipstick type on this Yanmar would not accept even the smallest hose that came with my extraction pump. Huh.
I searched the Nordhavn Owners Group forums for a solution but came up empty. I sent out a message to other Nordhavn 43 owners about this question. The best answer was to drain the oil from the crankcase plug at the bottom of the engine into a small tray and use the Reverso pump to suck the oil from the tray into the main waste oil reservoir. I considered this approach until I saw how confined the space was under the engine. I could see myself making a huge mess of things that way.
Some more searching of the internet and the suggestion of a fellow N43 owner pointed me to a more elegant solution: plumb a connection from the Reverso system that attaches over the dipstick tube.
I made a quick trip to our local hardware store and bought a 1/2″ brass fitting with a barbed connector and a 6″ length of 5/8″ tubing (1/2″ interior dimension) — total cost: $6.00. I was able to attach this to the end of the Reverso hose and fit the plastic hose snugly over the dipstick tube. It’s vital to get the tube over the small air bleed hole on the dipstick tube.
Once connected, I removed the oil filler cap to avoid a vacuum and switched on the Reverso drain pump. I had warmed up the engine, and the oil drained out in less than a minute. Super easy and no mess. The oil filter was a breeze to replace, and I had new oil in the engine minutes later.
It’s a good feeling to find an easy solution to this recurring maintenance need … and knock off one more task from the list ahead of our looming departure.