Engine musings

I completely forgot to mention, in my last post, our visit last Saturday to Seamark Nunn near Felixstowe to look at the possibility of replacing our elderly, thirsty, unpleasant and above all unreliable 2-stroke outboard.

There's no way that any of the current two cylinder 8hp 4-strokes will fit in the well and, in any case, they cost in excess of £2k which is more than is worth spending. So I'd already investigated the options on single cylinder engines and reckoned that the best bet would be a Suzuki 6hp unit.

Honda only go up to 5hp in the singles and have a bit of a poor reputation these days, surprising because in years gone by I'd have sworn by Honda engines. All the other possibilities come with very low output charging, usually as an option, whereas the optional charging on the Suzuki is the best of the bunch at 6A.

Martin, Seamark's very helpful outboard chap, promised to try and get me a line drawing of the engine so I can check it will actually fit! The quote including the charging option is about £1250 which is on budget.

Now the logic of replacing the engine may not be immediately obvious however I think it makes sense provided we do it right away. The 2-stroke has averaged, over this year, a consumption of about 3 litres an hour and burns fuel particularly quickly when motoring into a chop or against a foul tide and at a frightening rate when doing both at the same time! Based on a reasonable anticipation of probably 50% more time available to spend on board next year and taking into account the amount of time on board but not going anywhere due to weather this year, it's a fair bet that we'll be motoring twice as much next year if not more.

Halving our fuel consumption, not an unreasonable assumption, will save us getting on for half the cost of the engine over 3 to 4 years which, coincidentally, is how long (being realistic) I reckon we'll be keeping Brigantia. At the end of that time, the engine will still have 2 or 3 years of warranty left and will be worth well over half of what it cost new. In theory, the engine will actually cost us nothing at all!

Financial considerations aside, the much improved fuel consumption will greatly increase our range under power without having to carry more fuel - (if Rik and I had, for example, tried to motor back from the Walton Backwaters to the Crouch, a situation we could easily find ourselves in if there's no wind and we have to get the boat back to base, we'd have run out of fuel somewhere around the Spitway even though we had 30 litres on board when we set out.

Another key consideration is that a new engine equals a reliable engine. OK, Brigantia is a sailing boat but you can't sail into or out of marinas and most of the time I wouldn't want to attempt to sail onto or off the pontoon at Fambridge for that matter! We simply have to have an engine we can trust.

Finally, there's no escaping the fact that the 2-stroke is an antisocial animal. It's extremely noisy and somewhat smelly.

Nope, if we're going to keep Brigantia for a while (and that's pretty much a given unless we win the lottery) we're going to indulge ourselves in a shiny new outboard ... provided it'll go down the hole of course!