Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We sailed last saturday night and headed to the grounds to fish, as we were shooting the nets I could hear an unhealthy clanking noise coming from the engineroom, the fire alarm started to ring off as well. I headed down to the engineroom to investigate and was met with smoke and sparks coming out of the auxillary engine gearbox.

This didn't look good, so I stopped the enngine andhad a look inside the clutch box. The teeth on the clutch were all over the engine bed and there was bits of metal on the deck plates in the engineroom. There was no way that this was going to be fixed at sea so, I hauled the gear back up with the gear retrieve and headed back to Newlyn.

We phoned paul our engineer and he very kindly came down early on sunday to look at the job and he told us that it was beyound repair. So we stripped the clutch box down and had a look at the drive shaft, the drive shaft was damaged as well, so paul suggested that we fit a direct drive shaft and do away with the troublesome clutch as this was not the first time this had happened.

We contacted C&O engineering in newton abbot and they said that they could do the job no problem at all. By wednesday evening that had made a coupling and a new drive shaft and we picked it up and it was aboard the boat that evening. We spent the day today putting the new shaft to the engine and lining it all up and I am glad to say (touch wood) that all is working welll again.

Once again many thanks to Paul and the men at C&O for getting the job done so quick. The weather hasn't been that great so we have only missed a couple of days,  were hoping to sail again tonight so lets hope we can get a weeks work in without to many problems.