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The Below Deck Sailing Yacht Season 4 fate looked grim when Captain Glenn Shephard and chief engineer Colin MacRae learned it could take weeks to restore Parsifal III’s salt water flooded engine.
But in a YOLO move on MacRae’s part, he seemingly achieved the impossible – and got the engine chugging along again. How did he do it?
Colin MacRae needed a ‘Mad Max’ approach to the engine
During the latest episode, Shephard explained no engine rebuild kit was available. “I have to try to think of something,” MacRae said. He calls Aaron the technician and asks for advice about running the aftercooler and an idea of how to get the engine running again. Aaron says only if there is “no other alternative” and if it was a “Mad Max world.”
“I happen to have experience salvaging engines,” MacRae explains in a confessional. “In 2018 I bought a hurricane-damaged boat. It sank on one side and one of the engines was underwater. We tried salvaging the engine and it ended up blowing up. So I know how bad it is to get salt water inside it. But there has to be a quicker solution apart from rebuilding this engine from the block up.”
He admitted his approach was ‘completely unorthodox’
MacRae meets with Shephard to share his plan to get Parsifal III back on track. “The goal is to get this thing running for the next couple of months,” he tells Shephard. “What I can do is I can pull the engine injectors out and see which cylinders were wet. And start cleaning the s*** out of the engine. Flush out that some and then run it without the aftercooler on it.”
Shephard clarifies, that if the engine isn’t cooled down, they can’t rev it as high. “Yeah, it’ll be less efficient,” MacRae confirms. “But maybe four or five knots or whatever but …”
Shephard laughs, “It’s about five knots faster than what we are doing now.” Now MacRae is laughing too.
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“What I’m about to do is completely unorthodox,” MacRae admits in a confessional. “But if we don’t try then we’ve got no charter season. It’s as simple as that.”
How did Colin MacRae finally get the ‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’ engine running?
MacRae returns to the engine room to tackle the problem. “Salt water is extremely bad in an engine,” he explains in a confessional. “It starts to corrode it. And if things corrode, they become weak. If things are weak, they break.”
MacRae pulls the engine apart, examining areas that could have been flooded. “We’re going to pull the injectors out and start sucking the salt water out,” he says. “And then we fill it with diesel and then we suck the diesel out so that it has a chance of spinning again. It’s a tedious task. Honestly, this is pushing me to my limits.”
Getting the engine started was no easy feat. MacRae tries to start it, but the engine doesn’t seem to turn over. So he goes back and makes sure the intake is clean. “We got as much of the water out as we possibly can at this point,” he says. “The next step is to start the engine and shoot out anything remaining in the cylinders.”
It is a huge job but MacRae is finally successful once he turns on the fuel. “Dude! Is that the main engine running?” Shephard asks. They laugh, high-five each other, and hug. “Colin’s always been a legend but he’s just gone up like three notches in my eyes,” Shephard says.
Even though MacRae brought Parsifal III’s engine back from the dead, they still have to test the engine. This means that the Below Deck Sailing Yacht charter 1 guests never leave the dock – and some let Shephard know they aren’t happy.
Below Deck Sailing Yacht is on Monday at 8 pm on Bravo.
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