Our weekend plan of a day sailing on the bank holiday Sunday had a few surprises.

We arrived to much nicer weather than I was expecting, the breeze was good for a sail and much warmer than forecast. Bonus!

Horsey Staithe was extra busy! We’d arrived in the middle of Horsey Open Regatta! Many many wonderfully kept broads sailing boats, traditional, modern, hire and private were here. Lots of people out for a fun day on the water. There were several families that stopped to ask about our little Westerly and say hi to our dog as he sat; tongue out watching people float or walk by.

We got to work fitting our “please don’t take our berth” signpost, undid sail covers, checked oil, filled up with another can of fuel and attached a little go-pro type camera to film our escapades for the day.

Given how busy things were I was going to make the call whether to pootle around the edge of the regatta watching the races, maybe anchor or if it were not too full of racers sail about the edges a little without getting in the way.

With the staithe jam packed with some very nice and bigger than usual boats we had two options. Cast off, go further up the dyke and turn around at the bend by the water hoses (the dyke is about 10m wide, so depending on who is moored opposite we can’t always turn around with ropes), or to reverse the whole way out (about 300m). Having not driven a Centaur backwards very much this didn’t seem like a great idea.

Engine started, an embarrassing amount of white-ish smoke for about 30 seconds (we’ve got an old engine, could do with new injectors). I checked that water was coming out the exhaust, it wasn’t hot, so all good. Engine revs peaked at idle for a second or two which was unexpected. While filling up with diesel I noted condensation on the inside of the filler so put it down to a little water in the fuel, not desirable but not unexpected.

We planned to reverse off a little, and turn around up by the fresh water tap. We had a problem a few weeks ago where the engine would not come out of reverse gear, with that in mind I put us in reverse for a second expecting a bit of a wiggle to cure it if we got stuck again.

I was treated to a new, unfamiliar whine sound. My first thought was that the stern gland was not adequately lubricated, that maybe the greaser wasn’t actually pushing grease into the shaft? So I put the engine in neutral in the hope the sound would go away. Or at least I “tried” to go into neutral. Nothing, no amount of jiggling, pressure, more throttle, less or anything would un-stick reverse gear so I stopped the engine. Once stopped neutral was easy to get into. Ok.. this could be annoying, twice now we’ve been stuck in reverse.. I decided to start up again and check transition from forward to neutral and if the strange new noise really was from the prop shaft turning.

Engine started (less smoke than before) forward gear there was no extra sound, could feel the gentle push on the mooring lines of our little Centaur pushing forward. Back to neutral, all fine, reverse… Stuck…

Ok.. Day out on the water now pretty much cancelled..

Out came the cockpit floor and open went the engine bay cover.

One of the first things we noticed was a bubble of fluid popping out of the selector fitting at the gearbox.

This didn’t feel like a good omen. Fearing that we’d leaked out all the gearbox oil, I checked the level in the Volvo reverse gear and found not old black oil, or no oil at all, but lots of oil (perhaps too much) and all a metallic grey pearl colour. Our gearbox oil was full of tiny bits of metal. Not good..

With my mind already mentally planning a “help me!” post to the WOA forums we opted for some different entertainment and paid a visit the Horsey Wind Pump run by the National Trust here. It’s an impressive piece of engineering history. Evie and Luke soon made their way to the top and took some photos while I frantically googled “volvo penta stuck reverse gear”

With little we could constructively do to fix our poorly gearbox, and really not wanting the crew of the day to have a 100% boring time we set about trying to do other things. Luke and Coco went off to explore the viewing area and catch some of the racing and I showed Evie how to make a plumb line out of some chord and some old bronze jib hanks. Evie managed to work out that our spot on the staithe was only 1.4m deep. Bear in mind the centaur draws about 1.2m!

Perhaps out of frustration I set about scrubbing things, cleaning the algae from around fittings and brushing away grass clippings, to my surprise this activity was an immediate hit, with Luke and Evie asking to join in making our boat look a little more ship shape, great fun was had filling buckets, sloshing water over the side decks and scrubbing the waterline from the banks.

Once we got home, the good folks on the Westerly Owners Association forum were full of encouraging advice and recollections of similar problems that didn’t all end badly. So added to the TODO list for my next trip I’m planning to flush out the metal from the reverse gear oil and fill it up fresh. There is a chance that the oil here has not been changed for years and the extra friction is stopping the gearbox disengaging (there is a spring inside apparently). I have my fingers crossed but in the back of my mind is the thought of a replacement engine..

Before I do that though, I’m going to finally filter out all the oil and rainwater from the engine compartment, it looks more than it really is in the video, but if I drop small gearbox parts I’d rather it went into a dry tray than one floating on contaminated water.

Right now I am hoping that this won’t be an early end to our first season.