Sunrise
Got out to open water and probably dropped 10 times and got a few bites.
Then the oil alarm went off on the port outboard motor. Limped in. Bad oil pump. We may be done fishing due to equipment failure just when the weather allows fishing.
2pm update: Boat at shop, waiting to hear. Best case we get boat back tomorrow afternoon and fish Friday night and Saturday.
4pm update: Yeah we got nothing. No news.
10am Friday – Boat will not be fixed until next week. No fishing. We are done.
So I may need to break out my “Rain, Rain go away?” soliloquy from Facebook. Still have 2 to 4 foot waves outside the bay so plan again today is to continue donating bait fish to the water. So yeah, no fish pictures yet.
I was just driving along….. minding my own business….. in my brother-in-law Mike’s F250 Super Duty when all of a sudden….. boom! It woke Mike and Uncle Bob immediately. “What the heck happened” is what I heard from the back seat.
We were going about 60 miles per hour and lost all power post-boom going up a slight incline. No turbo boost at all. Turbo diesels have no cahones without their turbos. Yep – something was wrong. We were less than an hour away from our rental house in Pensacola, FL and had been driving for 11 hours already that day.
I was able to pull the truck over to the side of the two lane highway and make a quick call to my buddies at Goldies Diesel Repair in Tucson, AZ. I highly recommend these guys! I described what happened hoping that the turbo had not grenaded. After a most excellent description of the incident, Eric nailed it. “It’s not your turbo, your CAC tube blew”.
I opened the hood and he was right! Eric explained that the CAC tube (Charged Air Cooler tube to intake) returns highly pressurized air to the intake of the engine. Since it blew the engine was getting zero pressurized air (turbo boost) and thus had no power at all. Not safe to drive either.
CAC Tube post-boomI was able to use duct tape to reconnect the tube to the intake which gave us some minimal boost to limp 4 miles to a gas station and a safer place to wait.
CAC tube with duct tape appliedWe were in very small town in Alabama called Citronelle, listening for banjo’s, so we wanted a quick solution. I got a tow truck on the way via AAA and started locating the part. I was able to locate the part 34 miles away in Mobile, Alabama and then located a courier service to bring us the part. I was employing two possible solutions at once. First was to repair in place once we got the part and the second was to have the tow truck available if we were not able to repair or got the wrong part delivered.
Tow truck took a while to get to us because, apparently, they usually only plan to transport two people – we had three. When Alan arrived with the truck, he said he could wait 15-20 minutes until the part arrived. Such a nice young guy!
When the courier service arrived two and one half hours post-boom – it was the correct part! It took an entire minute (seriously, one minute) to put the new CAC tub in place (we used just the top part of the tube, since that is what failed). Started the truck and had boost! We were back on the road!
Lessons learned:
1 – Carry a spare CAC tube if you drive a 6.7 Powerstroke Turbo Diesel. The will completely disable your truck if they go boom and are WAY simple to fix. They cost about $106 at a Ford dealer. We required the parts with the green highlights in the diagram.
DiagramNote: Eric from Goldies said they have only heard of one other CAC tube blowing this way so he thinks this particular failure its rare. I still plan on carrying a spare one.
2 – Carry a space serpentine belt. This another part on newer engines that can disable the engine and is a relatively simple road side fix.
3 – Always have duct tape on hand. It allowed us a temporary fix which allowed us to get to a safe place to wait for the part. Safety is good.
4 – Always carry tools!
We had the duct tape and tools which saved us. I will certainly be adding the serpentine belt and spare CAC tube to my travel kit for my F250 Powerstroke!
This little guy captures so very perfectly the inner me right after – the face, the dirt and the pose!
We are going to start building the F250 into an Overland vehicle. What is overlanding? Why not use the Rubicon? That would be a great post for some other day – for now – google it or head over to overlandbound.com (we are member #5770) or get Overland Journal. Awsome magazine… anyway I digress.
I enjoy researching over-landing “stuff” in general but also technology related to over-landing. Given we are hopefully going to do more overland trips in the future (whoop!) with the F250 build but also possibly a fifth wheel, we may need some safety gear for those times when the good old cell phone is out of range. If your relaxing correctly, your out of range IMO. Lets look into that then shant we?
So, as usual, it depends on the requirements. Requirements are good. They keep you focused. They make you think before you purchase. They are great talking points when defending the more expensive purchases to your wife. Nuff said.
My requirements would be, in priority order:
Ability to summon help when feces has really hits the fart fan.
Update people with your location so they don’t worry.
Two way communication when needed and out of cell tower range.
Not require HAM radio ( I have one and license, but don’t want it to be the only safety comms I have).
Have some additional features that make the device useful when it isn’t saving your life, like GPS and mapping and updating your web site with location.
Here are some options:
goTenna – a mesh network for your iPhone. Interesting but wont help if you are all alone someplace. Might be helpful for localized emergencies or large crowds.
Spot – now that’s much better – works anywhere, and have used the older models. Does not “do” much else tho.
inReach Explorer+ – Now were talking… and it’s a GPS as well AND would sync with the iPhone and iPad pro (which will look nice mounted on the dash someday – yet another post). Going to add this to my Amazon gift list. Yeah I have one, leave me alone.
About time I started a blog. I need to get in the habit both personally and professionally.
I don’t do Facebook. I haven’t now for over year and overall really don’t miss it. Linda keeps me up-to-date with what’s going on in our extended circle of friends and we both keep in touch with my family and close friends personally.
One thing I do miss about Facebook is being able to go back and look at what I have done in the past as reminders for me. Also I plan to use this as a sort of personal Wikipedia of things I need to reference. So personal and professional project related stuff here mostly. I shall see.
Some of it may be boring to you, some not. This will be an experiment for me and may disappear at any time – I will see what happens and adjust. Fail fast, One Life Life It!
