We had a discussion a couple weeks back on "get home" engines. A delivery crew running my boat to Seattle had an incident recently. All was well, but it points the value of having a get home engine, and a monitoring system. So, I'm reposting the following excerpt from my blog. ----- "... As Jeff, my delivery skipper, was off the Pacific coast of Washington, approaching Cape Flattery, they had a mechanical glitch. They were in high seas at the time, getting slammed by high winds, and a 10 foot swell. I have a vessel monitoring system, called Simon. It is constantly monitoring 200+ different things around the boat at all times. Simon has a track ball, next to the steering wheel in the pilot house, which is normally green. It blinks yellow when it senses something that seems unusual somewhere on the boat, and RED when something seems VERY unusual. When it goes red, alarms go off and red lights start blinking in the engine room. It definitely gets your attention. Well, in the final hour, as Jeff was approaching Cape Flattery, Simon went red. When Simon calls, we bring up the Simon screen on the computer, and it tells us what is wrong. It said the voltage on the starboard engine alternator had risen rapidly. The alternator should put out 28 volts for battery charging, but it had jumped to 38 volts, and was still rising. When the guys got to the engine room, they could smell immediately that something wasn't right. One of them, Joe, shot the heat gun at the alternator on the port engine; 110 degrees, then at the alternator on the starboard engine; 250 degrees. Ouch. Jeff killed the starboard engine. Sans Souci could continue just fine on a single engine, but the best guess was that the voltage regulator had failed on the alternator, and that pulling the wire to the alternator would solve the problem. The alternator on the starboard engine is outboard the engine, meaning it is wedged between the starboard engine and the starboard fuel tank. To reach the alternator, Joe would have to climb over the hot engine, and wedge himself into the gap. Easy for Joe, but it would probably be a lot tougher for me. With the wire removed, Sans Souci was back underway, with both engines, in minutes. But, this raises an interesting question. What would have happened without the Simon monitoring system? The needle on the engine voltage indicator did rise, but I doubt anyone would have noticed. Certainly the odor would have been noticed on an engine room check, but what would be the impact of feeding 38 volts to the batteries for an hour or two? This is how electrical fires can start. Simon earned its' keep! ..." ----- This whole event was a "non-event" because of the monitoring system, and the twin engines. If instead, my boat were a single engine boat, with no get home capability, and no monitoring system, it would have been a much bigger deal. The seas were too rough to have completely stopped the boat. If instead of twin engines, I had had a single engine and a wing engine, the wing could have been started to keep the boat out of trouble, while the main engine were stopped to solve the problem. I've seen passagemakers that use a chain between their shaft, and the genset, as their get home capability. Personally, I don't like this idea. On all of the boats I've been on that had this, it looked like a reasonably long process to put the chain in place, that would be complicated by being pitched around. Had this happened on a single engine boat, with no get home capability, it could have become a dangerous situation, even if detected early. I don't think I'd like the idea of trying to kill the wiring at a hot alternator, while the engine is running. It doesn't sound that much fun to use wire cutters to cut through wire knowing 100+ 24v amps are running through it. And, I also know I wouldn't like killing the engine in dangerously high seas. I'm not sure what I'd do... If there is a message to this story, it's that I can't imagine a passagemaker that doesn't have a wing engine or twin engines. And, I'd suggest that some degree of real-time vessel monitoring should be part of the design. -Ken Williams Sans Souci, Nordhavn 68