After lunch I went below and pulled the ladder away from the engine hatch and crawled in. I studied this fuel pump thing. You could see the copper tubing that fed it coming from two places on the fuel tank above. There were five junctions in the tubing where air could be leaking in. Or the seal at the pump itself could have an invisible pinhole. Start with the obvious. I took the pump off and took it on deck. John and Ireland glanced over as I wiped the seal with a rag. The rubber gasket was immaculate, but I smeared it with a layer of silicon rubber, for insurance, and went below and bolted the pump back in place with the silicon wet. A couple hours later, I suggested we try it again.
The batteries were very low from trying to start the engine for the last two days, but the engine caught. We had been through this enough to know not to get crazy about the fact that the fucking engine ran, so we just sat where we were and waited. She died in less than five minutes. I nodded. John got back into his book. Ireland drew.
I went back into the engine compartment and stared at the fuel pump. It was stifling in the small place because of the heat of the day, and now the engine was hot from its little workout.
So, if you prime the pump full, it works—the engine runs until the fuel in the pump is gone. I knew the seal was tight; they use silicon to seal fish tanks. Obviously, the lines feeding the pump must have a leak. I looked at the tubing. Air could get in at a connection, or in through a pinhole in the tubing itself. It could be anywhere. There wasn’t a hint of fuel leaking out, so it was so small that only air leaked in. I took the fuel pump off again and studied the primer pump mechanism. The lever pushed a piston which squeezed out fuel. I pressed it until all the fuel squirted out. Then it just hissed as it pumped air. It pumps air. Idea jumped into my brain. What if I put the pump back on backwards? Then when I primed the pump, I’d be pumping air, under pressure, into the fuel line. Brilliant.
I went below and reversed the connections. I let the pump hang loose beside the engine. I attached the pump’s outlet to the fuel line.
I went into the cabin and got some Joy detergent, put some in a coffee cup, and mixed it with water. I got a rag and crawled back under the cockpit, next to the engine. I swabbed the soap mixture on each joint, one at a time, and pumped the fuel pump. If the problem really was an air leak, then I should see bubbles at the hole. At the last junction, a T-connector mounted on the engine compartment bulkhead, I saw foam.
“Hey!” I yelled. I was standing inside with my head out the hatch. “I found the fucking problem!”
“No shit?” John said.
“What’s it ees, Ali?” Ireland said.
“We got an air leak in a coupling. C’mon.” I waved. “C’mon, I’ll show you.” I was practically giggling. John crawled in with me, and Ireland squatted on the cabin deck. “Watch,” I said, pumping the fuel pump.
“Son of a bitch!” John yelled. “That’s it! That little fucking leak is all it takes!”
“Right. All we have to do is epoxy the joint, seal it up. That’ll fix it. At least well enough to get us cruising again.”
“Right,” John said, laughing. “We can put on a new fitting in Saint Thomas.”
We had lots of epoxy resin. It’s used to make repairs on fiberglass boats. John mixed up a few ounces of the stuff and smeared the goo all around the fitting. Nothing would ever leak in that coupling again. I put the fuel pump back on the right way and we went on deck to wait for the epoxy to cure.
John was beside himself with happiness. He drank two beers in quick succession. We were due in Saint Thomas in a week. He’d had a radio message on the single-sideband that we would be met there by the scam master himself, who’d bring us money. The transmission was encoded as usuaclass="underline" it sounded like a transmission between a home office and a freighter. The conversation was mumbo-jumbo about cargo, spare parts we needed, part numbers, and consignment numbers. Lots of numbers. The numbers were the message. John read some part numbers he said we needed that gave the scam master our position. The scam master sent changes to shipping order numbers that included the date and time he was going to meet us in Saint Thomas. So if this fuel-line patch worked, we would be on our way, and maybe even on time.
Near sunset, we figured the epoxy was set. We went below and pecked at the stuff with a screwdriver. Hard as a rock. I primed the fuel pump.
“Okay,” John said to Ireland, “give it a crank.”
Groan. Kapock. Sigh. The batteries were too weak to turn the engine.
“Goddammy!” Ireland yelled. “It’s always fucking something!”
John nodded, and slid out the tool drawer under the chart counter. He dumped a bunch of tools—Snap-On sockets, Vise-Grips, screwdrivers, torque wrenches—on the deck and fished out a long metal rod, bent in two places, with a socket at one end. He fit the socket onto the end of the engine’s crankshaft. “Okay. We can start this thing manually. I’ve done it before.”
He held the crank handle steady with his left hand and cranked with his right. He could turn the engine over, but, as strong as John was, it was too slow. A diesel builds up much more compression in its cylinders than does a regular gasoline engine. I grabbed the crank from the other side and together we tried again. Yank, push. Kathunk, kathunk, pow! We were puffing at the effort. It was like trying to spin a top in sand: there’s no momentum to it; it’s all brute force. Kathunk. Kathunk. Pow! Growl!
John yanked the cranking rod free of the engine and everybody cheered.
After four hours of listening to every little click, clack, pop, belch, and whirr that came out of the engine compartment, we began to relax. The engine ran perfectly. The Namaste was under way.
We celebrated that night by breaking out one of the freeze-dried dinners we’d brought. We only had a dozen of them. We got out the pork chops. They looked like cardboard disks, but when you soaked them and boiled them, damned if they didn’t turn into genuine pork loin chops. We served up freeze-dried peas and about a gallon of egg noodles. This sailing life is fine.
Ireland woke me up at eight a.m. I blinked at him in the dim morning light coming through the clear hatch in the roof of the cabin. “Where’s John?” I asked. He was out of cycle. Bob wakes John; John wakes me; it’s the cycle. Ireland shook his head. “John wouldn’t wake up.” He smiled. “Too much fun, eh?”
“Yeah, but that means you took his watch, Ramon.”
He nodded and crawled into his bunk across the cabin.
I sat at the tiller angry as hell. The captain of a boat should never miss his watch. I was looking for perfection here. I was remembering how if one guy in the team fucks up, the team gets wasted. We had assholes like that in the Cav. We had a captain in our company, a guy we called Daisy, who’d always go into the fetal position in his seat during the assaults. He’d hear the pilots yelling on the radios about taking hits, see the tracer bullets, and then he’d squinch down in the seat, pull up his feet, and try to hide behind his chicken-plate (what we called the bulletproof chest armor). You can’t fly while you’re cowering in the seat. If the other pilot got wounded or killed, nobody would be on the controls. When you let go of the controls of a helicopter, it goes eight directions at once, apeshit wild. That captain didn’t seem to understand that if the ship went, he went. He was too overcome with fear to think.