Rowkin Rovings Blog

Friday 3^rd June 2016 – As last night’s stop point at FrogHall

is at the terminus of the Caldon Canal, all we need to do now is turn around and head back the way we came. It took us 4 days to come up the Caldon from the Trent and Mersey at Eturia junction but we will now “fly” back in 2 days so that we can get to Eturia for the canal festival which is on this Sunday.

The day started by back tracking through the 5 foot by 5 foot FrogHall tunnel.Gosh this is a squeeze.

The day was all going as planned until we suddenly seemed to lose any power on NB Lucy at ½ or full throttle. Our guess was that we had some fouling of material on the prop or prop shaft. We pulled over and undid the weed hatch cover to discover some old rope, fishing line and general crap wound around the prop shaft. We were able to cut through it using Pete’s universal tool that he gave us before leaving Canada (thanks Pete) and got everything nice and clear.

Headed of again with full power. Problem sorted………..…….

………………..Until 10min later when the motor shut down completely and would not start at all.

Mmmmm.

We have plenty of fuel, the motor cranks, there is spark but it won’t fire up???

Time to phone the Stone Marina and speak to NB Lucy’s trusty mechanic.

We went through a check list until we got to the bit about the butterfly valves that feed from the diesel tank to the fuel pump and onto the engine. One of them was in the off position rather than on, thus there was no fuel going to the engine.

Thinking it through what had happened was that in getting into the engine compartment to clean the prop shaft through the weed hatch we had inadvertently bumped the butterfly valve into the off position thus cutting of fuel to the engine without even knowing it.

OOPs, guess we won’t do that again.

Turned the fuel back on and started her up and off we went.

Problem sorted…………

For the second time.