Sunday, April 2, 2018, I spent the day with John Kalinowski, the skipper of Sleigh Ride, the 32 foot Sabre sailboat down in Deltaville VA that I raced on the past two years. We “bent” on the sails (a nautical term for attaching the sails), tuned the rig (equally tightened the stays that hold the mast up using a metal gauge), replaced the fuel filter, disassembled a recalcitrant winch, and replaced an impeller, the rotating rubber piece inside the seawater

coolant pump. The rubber degrades and should be changed yearly before the fins fall off. 

As it turns out, Westerbeake, the manufacturer of the Sabre’s diesel engine, never improved on their 1940s tractor design, i.e., all the important parts (oil filter, fuel filter, seawater pump, and coolant pump) are accessible to a farmer standing in a barn with complete access all around and under the engine.

Hey Westerbeake, this “marine” engine is in a hole open only to the front!

Back to the impeller. Other manufacturers put their impeller on the front. You loosen five or six bolts, pull the plate off, pull the impeller out, put a new one in, put a fresh gasket on, screw the plate back on, and you are done in ten minutes. Simple, easy, something you can do at sea, in the dark, on a rocking boat, if necessary.

So Westerbeake hides the impeller behind the alternator and facing backward! Morons! 

Here were the steps we took to replace the impeller. Did I mention you should do this every year?

Disconnect the batteries in case you cross wires. Unbolt the alternator electrical connections and mounting bolts. Remove the heavy, ungainly alternator. Next, unbolt two electrical and two seawater connections to the impeller. Reach around to the four impeller mounting bolts that you can’t see and try to loosen them by turning a wrench with one inch of arc. Flip the wrench, find the bolt, nudge it, flip again, find the bolt … The bolts alone took 30 minutes to remove. Oh yeah, they are hard to hold onto and drop into the bilge. 

Pull the impeller out, THEN go through the other manufacturer’s steps above. Ok, reverse all the steps above making sure you get the right bolt in the right hole, hook up the in and out seawater hoses in the right direction, and don’t mismatch the electrical connections frying your pump and alternator. 

A ten-minute procedure that took two hours.  

The definition of sailboat cruising is “Boat repair in exotic locations”.