Unintended consequences

In my late 20s, I somehow bit off more than I could chew, talking the owners of an emerging excursion boat business into implementing my grand plans for its expansion. I modeled this expansion on another business I worked for: the 10th largest excursion boat company in the country. Why not do this for this fledgling operation? No matter that I had no business experience (or savvy, for that matter). As a former captain for this business, I didn’t manage the company – I drove the boats. And I merely observed operations.

We’ll expand the historic tours. We’ll start jazz cruises. We’ll run whale watches. We’ll do private charters. We’ll rent an offshore island and do clambakes and corporate events out there. We’ll . . . .

I was all ideas. And actually, for a while, we were cruising right along.

The problem was the infrastructure. The floating infrastructure, i.e., the boats we had. They were old. They were wooden (remember wood?). They had old engines. One had two huge 6-110 GM diesels; a motor that was used for freight-train generators. Freight trains. Go figure.

One day, coming back from an island clambake, one of those huge 6-110s “ran away.” No, it didn’t climb out of the boat and head for greener pastures. This was a diesel runaway, which, believe me, is a scary thing. I’ll let Wikipedia handle it:

“Engine runaway is a rare condition affecting diesel engines, in which the engine draws extra fuel from an unintended source [its own lube oil] and overspeeds at higher and higher RPM, producing up to 10 times the engine’s rated output until destroyed by mechanical failure or bearing seizure through lack of lubrication.”

The way to stop that is to shut off the diesel’s air supply. In our case it meant going down in the engine room with those 660-cubic-inch screaming banshees and doing just that. Usually, the best way is to jam a sweatshirt or lifejacket or whatever’s handy into the air intake. In this case, the young crewmember emptied a soda acid fire extinguisher into the air intake. Not good. Kind of like a human drinking battery acid. It’ll shut you down all right, ruining your insides. The engine certainly shut down. For a long, long time. The next season, when we finally got it running, all business resumed. We’d built a fancy new bar and redone the side panels on the main deck. We’d booked charters, whale watches and even a few wedding receptions. Things were going smoothly. One of the captains put the boat to bed after his last charter one evening, and on the morning of the fully booked next afternoon and night, we couldn’t get either motor started. In a panic over a lot of potentially lost revenue and bad will, we all scrambled. We chased down the potential causes. Nothing. So we called Andy, the greasy-faced guru who could solve anything. He was stumped. “Only thing left,” he said, “is the fuel pickup line at the top of the big fuel tanks.”

“How are we going to get at them,” I asked.

“Tear up the new bar and bar floor.”

“You’re serious?”

Andy just shrugged.

So that’s what we did.

And that wasn’t the problem.

Andy rubbed his increasingly smudged face. “I’m stumped,” he said. Then he headed back to the engine room. I followed him. He crouched down between the two big diesels, and shook his head. “I’m really, really stumped,” he said again, leaning his right arm on the top of one of the engines. He screamed. “What is it?” I asked, confused about how a cold engine could be hot.

Andy grinned from ear to ear. “It’s the solenoid,” he said. It’s the darned hot solenoid. The one we installed last season to shut down the engines from the pilothouse if one ever ran away again.”

“But why would it be on?”

So we went to the pilothouse, opened the cabinet under the wheel, and sure enough, the engine emergency shutdown switch was flipped.

So what happened?

All had been fine the night before when the captain docked and put the boat to bed. The pilothouse had been locked after that. So we asked the captain when he arrived that day. He was as perplexed as we were. Then I saw a glimmer of awareness come into his face.

“The lifejacket. I sat on it,” he finally said.

“Huh?”

“I pulled out the lifejacket from the cabinet under the wheel to sit on during the charter last night. To get me up higher, see better. When I stuffed it back after docking last night it must have caught on the switch.”

Huh.

So what’s the lesson learned?

Beats me.

Dave Roper’s new novel, “Rounding the bend: The Life and Times of Big Red,” was released in mid-June and is available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.