1993

OUTBOARDS

So it’s ’93, early summer in Puerto Rico and yours truly is hammering Thalia and himself east across the top of the Caribbean, I’m in company with a few other boats, obviously all of us “newbies”, I mean who else would do it when in the winter we could do it with grace and style by riding the cold fronts. So we’re out there finding out that the term beating is short for “beating the s**t out of your boat and self.” I think we were in Boqueron and its happy hour, it’s also blowing a solid 25 kts through a large harbor. I’m to meet my friend Oscar on the dock for a beer, but first I have to row the Chameleon nesting dinghy to the dock, easy when it’s calm even with the 5’ oars, which is all you can lay down in a nesting dink. The dinghy actually rows well, but this time it took 20 min and I could see Oscar losing it with my slow progress. I finally reached the dock and said breathlessly “Damn, I need to find a piece of s**t Seagull or something, sorry about that” the words were no sooner out of my mouth than a guy on a boat at the dock says “I’ve got one of those, wanna buy it? C’mon up and have a peek and a beer.” Obviously we did so, besides it’s always fun to meet other members of the cruising community. He drags out an old seriously dirty Seagull and 3 beers while explaining “It hasn’t been used in 5 yrs because if you ran it above idle it would heat seize.” “Ok, so there’s a cooling problem, wonder what it uses for an impeller?” I think to myself while we discuss, boats, cruising life and its associated joys and foibles. That round leads to another and another and another and pretty soon our new friend is out of beer. As much out of guilt for drinking all his beer as anything else I offer him $35 for the Seagull, as far as I could tell all the parts were there and once I unseized it it may actually run. He accepts my offer with a smile and we put it in my dinghy and offer to buy him a couple of beers in the bar, another accepting smile. Cruisers are so accommodating, always a pleasure to have around.

I returned to Thalia with my new project vowing to get it running in the morning. Ha, not a chance, not only couldn’t I get it to turn over, most of the fasteners were frozen. No point in breaking more stuff so I started stripping the electrical system prior to tossing the little beast in a 5 gal bucket of diesel, clearly fuel was cheaper then and besides I could run it through a Baja filter and dump it in the tank. Thalia has a 2 micron polishing filter and cruisers are nothing if not cheap. Lo and behold under the flywheel I found a CDI ignition system, this Seagull might only be 10 or 15 yrs old, a very un-British addition to an old design, after all, I think, Seagulls were around taking troops off the beach at Dunkirk. I’d need a Seagull aficionado to be sure and make no mistake they exist, I’ve met them, of course they’ll only talk to you if you’re currently using a Seagull. It’s sort of the same as Harley owners, they’d rather drink used sump oil than talk to the owner of a rice rocket bike. Of course they’re weirder in a way than Harley owners, I mean who else would want to use an outboard with such a paucity of recoil starts, unless they actually get off on whipping their passengers with a frayed starter cord? It’s the outboard for S & M freaks. “That’ll be 10 of your best Mr Jenkins.” “Ay Captain Heimgrinder, 10 it is sir.” Pull, pull, pull, they usually start on the 10th, unless you’ve over “tickled “ the Amal carb, then break out the oars, she’s flooded, mate. The Brits have a long and strange engineering/manufacturing history, years ago my friend Ross and I had a multi- year love/hate affair with old British sports cars, we had 5 Triumph TR 3s at one point, 3 under restoration and 2 for parts. We were well used to struggling with Lucas “Prince of Darkness” electrical systems, which is undoubtedly where the Seagulls CDI system came from, SU dashpot carbs, etc. The British arguably have some of the finest engineers in the world, it can’t be an accident that most F1 teams are based there and in the 50’s and 60’s if you wanted a sports car or bike it was either British or Italian, not much of a choice there. But they clearly suck at reinvesting, developing new models or revising stuff that doesn’t work on current models, bear witness to the final humiliation of the MGB, a marque that has an illustrious past. Now remember those monstrosity rubber bumpers they put on them for the north American market just to suck a few more years out of the poor tired model, this in the face of Datsun’s 240Z?

After 2 wks of intermittent immersion in diesel the outboard came apart easily, once the head was off it was clear that the water passages were hopelessly salted up, I boiled them out with acid, bolted everything together and with a fervent prayer started tickling and pulling. Holy s**t, it runs, I even put oil in the lower unit at that point, of course when I checked it 2 wks later there was just salt water, but it ran on salt water for over 2 years, occasionally, but that’s sort of normal for a Seagull, never did find the impellor, never looked. I think in ’96 I bought a Yamaha 2 hp, they’re not British. George and Thalia

“If I’m lyin…”