A ship in full time operation in commission tends to stay in good shape. Yes, wear and tear is a thing but keeping moving is good thing too. This is, of course, due to a good, well-equipped crew working on her steady in good conditions with the gear and tools needed. When a ship is in full time commission, everything usually gets looked after regularly, even daily. Usually.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion…..
Isaac Newton said this a long time ago, I think it was he…
He may have been talking about apples or planets or bowling balls with no friction – but true enough for ships too. Well crewed and outfitted ships, anyway. More or less, you still have to do the work – it’s not mystical magic, it’s work. Onward.
We sailed into Lunenburg with Picton Castle in June 2019 at the end of our seventh amazing world voyage and 22 years after our first such voyage. My family and I stepped ashore, and the new captain took over. He wasn’t really ‘new’, but new to command of this ship. Captain Dirk Lorenzen has sailed in other large square-riggers, been in command of many vessels and had sailed mate here in Picton Castle for ages. I had complete confidence in him and the crew. Within two weeks the ship sailed off again, bound for the great inland seas of North America and the ten ports hosting tall ship festivals all summer long sponsored by Tall Ships America. We were invited to be one of the largest “Class A” tall ships in the fleet. No doubt, the ship which ranges the furthest. After the world voyage, and then when all finished with this travelling maritime country-fair on the Great Lakes in September, the Picton Castle sailed back. The ship looked great, and the engine room was just humming along in shiny tickity-boo order. Then we laid the ship up for the coming winter. All set to sail again a few short months later in the next spring to the South Pacific. Or so we thought.
Of course, COVID-19 changed all that. People got sick, travel and countries shut down. The Picton Castle could not move an inch.
Time went by. Voyage starts postponed repeatedly due the pandemic. Bosun School sessions come and gone. We then decided that for a COVID-19 break-out voyage a world circumnavigation was just the thing. Our many signed-up and long waiting trainees agreed whole heartedly.
Then last summer in 2022, thinking that we were out of the woods, with this great gang signed up for new voyage, and in preparation for sailing this fall just past, among many other things, we started in earnest getting the Picton Castle deck, rigging, sails and the engine room and its fine gear back online and up to snuff, with the full and reasonable expectation of sailing in the autumn. All was in line, enough to keep us busy, but no insurmountable obstacles. It makes a big difference that the basic quality of her gear is so excellent to begin with. But we had work to do. Yes, we did. We had been laid up long time. But as the saying goes, “not our first rodeo.” Some may have doubted this but never mind them. Many thought we would never make our first world voyage.
Back in the engine room. Soon the main engine was rolled over. Exhaust system cleaned out, injectors tested, lube oil changed. Generators back online, piping examined – some replaced, wiring checked through, fire fighting systems, gauges and valves loosened up, pumps and valves rebuilt, bilge systems, electric motors and pumps overhauled, water-makers back online, new battery bank for our DC electrical system, and plenty more.
Soon enough the big Alpha main engine was purring like a kitten. A VERY BIG kitten. Maybe more like rumbling like a lion or a dragon. It sounded perfect and comforting. Everything else had to be thoroughly checked out too. One by one, every piece of the engine room had to made sweet again. In October things were looking pretty good down there. All navigation and comms gear in the chart house was online. Safety gear aboard and drilled in. Boat hoisted. Due to the recent shutdown of nearby Lunenburg Slipways, we could no longer drydock in Lunenburg, so we steamed 90 miles to Shelburne Ship Repair to haul the ship out. We saw this as a useful short ‘shake-down’ cruise for the engine. Good to steam her under load, everything hammering away at once for a while, not just for hours at the dock as we had been doing. A loose pressure relief valve popped off at one point but was sorted out pronto from our supply of spares.
Curiously, the steering compass was surprisingly spot-on for this transit. This surprised me anyway, after being tied up so long with the ship aligned in one position in relationship with the planet’s magnetic field. Compasses often go a little whacky over time. Not this one, not this time.
At Shelburne Ship Repair it was a bit chaotic at the start but the hauling of the ship went smooth enough by the time we were situated on the cradle. Once high and dry, looking around before the water-blasting we found the hull much cleaner than I expected. That must have been some good bottom paint they put on at Fiji. Fiji has a great shipyard, that and at Cape Town, two of the best. They do high quality, great work and fast and cheerful.
It looked like this was going to be pretty much our standard haul out, same as we normally do every two years. The zincs, which prevent electrolysis, while naturally in need of replacement, were also 50% intact or better. They could have been near gone. We pulled all the big bronze thru-hull fittings and did some plate work in a couple spots below the waterline. By the week’s end we were still on schedule and ready to launch again. The plan then was to head back to Lunenburg for some more planned steel work higher up while we crossed t’gallant yards, reeved off running rigging, bent sail, stowed the ship, got the big world voyage crew already with us trained up and drilled, to take off southbound as soon as we could after hurricane season.
Then just before we were to be relaunched by the shipyard, right on schedule, the hauling gear of the railway at Shelburne Ship Repair broke down and failed catastrophically, in pieces – and would have to be replaced we were told – and we were told that we could expect to be stuck on the cradle for a while. The first estimate we were told was that it was going 6 to 8 weeks before we would be re launched. Now we are looking at 18 weeks extra ‘on the hard’ – as the phrase would have it. Not so good. Frustrating? Difficult to express how frustrating this is.
In the last Captain’s Log we told you about what the stalwart deck gang was doing on the ship with their time. Cabin work, scullery overhaul, painting, varnishing, this and that, good stuff, mostly miscellaneous jobs inside the ship. This log will be a look at what our excellent Chief Engineer Julien and his go-get-‘em main helper Spring have been doing in the engine room of the Picton Castle in all this time. All to the good. Arguably much nicer to do most of this work in the warm trade-wind tropics instead of winter Nova Scotia but press on they have. These are the days we have been handed to us, like it or not. Press on we must…
While Julien and Spring have done wonderful stuff in the engine room, we cannot run up machinery while we are out of the water. This will take some time once we are back in the water. Nobby Peers of Whitworth Marine, from the first world voyage and more, and designated shore engineer, remains the godfather of the engine room and is constant source of wisdom to Picton Castle engineers serving on board.
An overview of Picton Castle’s engine room
I suppose the first thing one might notice is that this engine room is quite large compared to many other sailing ships our size, or auxiliary sailing ships. By definition, a sailing ship, to be called such, has no engine and thus no engine room. This expanse space in PC we see as a fine feature of this ship. We like it big. Too often sailing ship engine rooms are treated as second class citizens. This main engine and auxiliary machinery are not buried and hidden away, pretending it’s not there. This is a real engine room, full of real machinery and we are proud of it.
This is an engineer’s engine room. This calls for a well versed and dedicated mechanically minded soul to look after it, and not just another task for a second mate or something like that. While it seems complicated at first, it is in fact a simple and easy to grasp engine room with sensible systems. Some of our best engineers have been those that grew up on farms fixing their own machinery. In Julien we have the best of the best.
This engine room was also pretty cleverly designed from the start, not some afterthought. This was once the engine room propelling a small Norwegian coaster in trade, sailing from Murmansk USSR to Portugal. It had to be self-reliant and reliable. And it has been for us too.
- The main engine is a seven cylinder, two cycle Danish Burmeister & Wain Alpha diesel installed in 1965. Believe it or not, it is not considered old. It starts with compressed air, and with the use of the specially fitted seventh cylinder, it can make its own air. It has a controllable pitch prop and while not fast – 8 knots flat out – it is quite powerful. It consumes about 1,000 litres of fuel a day when steaming. Ten gallons an hour. A little over a gallon per mile. Good thing we sail almost all the time. It does save on tug boats getting into harbours like Tahiti and Cape Town though. With a southwest wind we can sail into Lunenburg Harbour.
The engine room is outfitted with three generators. These can all charge our DC battery powered system. This allows us to have the generator on for 4-6 hours a day instead of constantly 24/7 as an AC ship requires.
- On the port side we have a 1975 six-cylinder diesel Lister generator. It starts on electricity and makes electricity both for direct use and charge the 110 DC battery system. And it makes air to charge the starting air tanks.
- On the starboard side we have the miraculous 1944 WWII-era four-cylinder Lister. Just keeps running and running. This starts on air and makes both air and electricity. It had proper tear down 20+ years ago and has been humming ever since. It is getting a preventative overhaul just now.
- Also on starboard is a one-cylinder Norwegian Sabb. Not a Swedish Saab. Hand crank start. When all else is down, this little motor can get everything going again. Runs tools and lights and warms up the main engine too as its cooling water goes through the main engine block. It’s also pretty cute.
So, everything is crossed connected and providing backup redundancy service. When I took the ship over and we started getting things sorted (1993), everything ran okay as far as we could tell. Seemed to all run fine – but as we had no sailing rig and a transatlantic passage in the offing, I knew I wanted this propulsion gear to be flawless before setting off across the Atlantic. We steamed from Norway to Denmark, the country of the engine’s origin and where these engines are considered a matter of national heritage, to do a massive overhaul of said engine. We did this at the yard of Thomsen & Thomsen at Marstal, island of Aero, Denmark. Marstal is a small town on the beautiful island of Aero in southern Denmark. And also the setting for that now famous novel We, The Drowned.
We spent a couple months at lovely Marstal and had a great and productive time. Here with qualified Danish B&W diesel mechanics we took the engine down to bare bones and built it all back up again to know for a fact that it was 100%. Took the ship out for sea trials with the yard engineers. They wanted to run her up as hot and as hard as possible. At a light 11-foot draft and everything screaming she got up to almost 12 knots off Aero in the Baltic seas. I did not like this so much, but the engine seemed to love it. This engine has never let us down ever since.
Other systems: water makers to keep our large tanks topped up and making it so we do not have to rely on getting funky water at old copra wharves here and there – or running out for that matter. Our consulting engineer suggested that with water makers we did not need big water tanks. A small holding tank would do. What if the water maker fails? We have big water tanks, and keep them topped up. Fire fighting systems, fuel management systems, bilge pumping systems, electricity management systems, refrigeration, air conditioning (just kidding! No air conditioning, nope, none) and so on. And we want a nice supply of spares, tools and a place to work on sundry. And we have all this. The way we sail, you want your spares with you, not on a shelf back at the workshop.
Here are some highlights or the engine room work Julien and Spring have been up to that are worth mentioning in a Captain’s Log.
“Fair winds, following seas AND clean diesel!”
A lot of work has been done “under the floor”, under the deck plates of the engine room, such as the overhaul of the seacocks, various new pipes installed, a good clean up in the bilge, all the bilge strainers cleaned up, bilge manifold overhauled… the ship came with heavy rusty steel floorplates. These we changed out with easier to clean aluminium diamond plate some years back.
Starboard four-cylinder Lister. This is an amazing piece of gear. A near perpetual-motion machine. This mechanical marvel is from 1944! When I inspected the ship for the first time in 1991, this was the owner’s pride and joy. He could not stop bragging on this piece of antiquity that worked so well. It is older than the engine room itself. It got a rebuild by Nobby at sea on the way to the Galapagos in 1998. And not much since, although we have had the spares standing by. Julien is currently working on this starboard generator. Checking for little coolant leaks, some other minor issues worth addressing now. A new set of injector pipes, new gaskets for various coolant flanges, overhauled/cleaned the heat exchanger inside tubes. With spare parts that we collected some time ago and were on hand. All while repainting the parts with the proper colour code (instead of the mostly all light blue). The exhaust manifold has been repainted and the air intake manifold is on the way too. This is GENUINE LISTER PETTER PEACOCK MARINE BLUE! A few auxiliary parts are already painted and ready to be installed. Would take few days to finish the project but it’s going on well so far. There is also the new exhaust insulating wrap that has been installed as well.
I could not be more pleased with the work Julien and Spring have accomplished.
If you are still interested, here is a somewhat dated, has a few minor facts wrong, and frankly, a bit snarky, video tour of the engine room but it gives a reasonable overview of the engine room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86pq0wnuOkg