"Roger Long" wrote in news:45a63053$0$16670
:

Ultimately, this is high stakes gambling. You can do a lot to
improve your odds but there are no guarantees on the outcome.


And, here we are, yet again, with either a flooded engine, flooded fuel
or flooded battery that prevented the engine from being cranked. From it
being English, I'm assuming it's a little diesel, maybe wrongly, but
let's think it is.

From my experiences with the diesels in sailboats, we need to do
something DIFFERENT and NEW with the EXHAUST system...more than a rubber
hose blowing over a loop with a siphon break hole at the top. I bet his
engine was flooded, before the rollover which was quite quick, by the
stupid way diesel exhausts are installed in sailboats, worldwide. Seems
like way too many times they get dismasted, their engines are dead and
can't help them.

Battery flooding takes a long time and he wasn't flooded from the look of
the waterline, again, like Barnes' boat. If she was full of water, the
little girl wouldn't have been swimming around in the cabin, I suppose.
Golf cart batteries have sealed liquid traps in them to take rollovers in
golf carts. I tried turning over an L16H on the dock onto its terminals.
We watched it for leaking. It never leaked a drop with the caps on it.
I suppose if the temperature were changing, it would eventually leak from
the pressure difference, but not just from a rollover. AGM/Gellcells, no
leaking either. Of course, poll your marina some Saturday morning or ask
the membership of any yacht club bar...."Are your batteries tied FIRMLY
down to the deck so the boat can roll over without them moving out of
place?" I'd bet the 99% answer is a resounding NO! How stupid they are.

The fuel tank needs more than just a vent hose, too. It needs some kind
of floating ball water trap that will seal if water tries to come into
the fuel vent in an event like this. Got one? Ever seen one? As the
air must go INTO the tank, we can't just put a flapper valve in it. It
has to be a floating ball that's normally open but closes the hole when
liquid floods the trap. Wish we had one on Lionheart. Let me know if
you've seen something like this. My coffee pot is a Cuisinart with a
vacuum bottle carafe, not a heater/glass pot. The most ingenious coffee
pot engineers design Cuisinarts. The screw-on cap on this pot has a
series of little gravity and floating balls that ingeniously prevent heat
from escaping the pot, while automatically opening the holes at the
appropriate time to let new coffee pour into the top and coffee pour out
the spout ONLY when the pot is tilted towards the spout. The rest of the
time it's sealed. This kind of technology needs to be in everyone's fuel
vent. It's not...it's a hose that assumes the boat never tilts over 20
degrees...dammit.

The diesel will run underwater if the damned air inlet is sticking out
AND the crankcase DOESN'T have an open vent outside the intake. That
belt sure pumps a lotta seawater around, submerged like that!..(c;

In these conditions we need to worry less about sails and rigging and
more about EMERGENCY POWER to the SCREW.

Larry
--
Extremely intelligent life exists that is so smart they never called
Earth.