Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

We started our trip last saturday night, we have been working 30-40 miles off to the ssw of Newlyn. The fishing has been reasonable but very spotty and we have been on the move constantly, trying to stop in the fishing.

We had poor weather again tuesday daytime, with  another southeasterly blow giving us a pasting again, when all of a sudden on janis's watch the fuel consumptionwent up as did the exhaust tempreture. So Janis got me up and when I had a look at the exhaust, I could see that we were smoking thick brown smoke, which was not good. We hauled the gear and I faxed home to say that we would be on our way in with a problem and I thought that it was an injector sticking.

Dad had organised for two injectors to be sent down from the Catapillar Depo in poole, and for paul our engineer to come down. When paul  came down we had to take each injector pipe off each injector in turn, so we could see which one had stuck and was causing the smoking. We were sure that it was number one injector, but the smoking never stopped even though we had tested each one, so something else was wrong.

We sat down for a cuppa and a good long think and paul said we will have  to look at the rockers or the valves, so we took number one head cover off and sure enough we seen the problem. The rocker bridge that connects the two rockers on number one cylinder had popped out of position, so paul put the bridge back in position and he then checked all the tappits.

We started the engine again and thankfully the smoke had cleared, so we landed our catch and we sailed again that night.  We arrived on the grounds in the early hours of thursday morning and started fishing once again, all was well with the engine but the fishing was up and down.

We fished for 3days but by saturday evening the wind was freshening so we hauled up about 1am sunday and headed back in, by the time we got into Newlyn it was blowing a good southerly gale.

We are landing our catch today, so it will be for sale at PTA on tuesdays market and the outlook for the next week is for westerly 8-9 all week right across the country, so get the fish while you can as supplies will be short next week.