Going Through the Oil!

I hear that the ditch is pretty crowded right now. Commercial traffic gets priority and I have heard from other Capts. that there are some pretty long delays if you want to run inside.

I went through the oil slick in the GOM in a 150 + semi displacement haul yacht. There was oil on the bow once arrived at destination point. I pulled the sea strainers after wards to see if there was signs of oil to enter the machinery space. There was none. I had no problems in the ER through our trip.

Hey C4,
Was looking for you at the Trinity yard a few weeks ago, but guess you were busy on that new ship.
Could you tell the depth of the oil you ran through, as was it a sheen or more of a slick that may have been a little thick? If it was a sheen perhaps the engine intakes were deep enough to miss the surface oil?

I should imagine that would depend on how close you are to the source. Has anybody heard from any of the boats working the spill?

I've heard that many of the commercial and offshore ships working the spill have keel coolers (for those that don't know, and I was one of those for a long time, that's a closed engine cooling system with cooling tubes that run along the keel, so no raw water intake into the engines).

(Photo courtesy of Diversified Marine Incorporated website)

Here we go again ... 99 percent of marine engines other than outboards are not raw water cooled. The raw water goes through a heat exchanger. It moves faster through the heat exchanger than it does past the tubes on a keel cooler.

There is no raw water going into the engine cooling passages on those boats. If oil was somehow drawn into the raw water inlet it would be very quickly flushed out of the system and cause no problems. There are about 50 boats working around the site of the blowout, in the rising plume of oil. They use seawater to cool the jacket water via heat exchangers, they are not dropping like flies due to oil fouling.

To be perfectly clear, there is more chance of losing cooling efficiency due to oil fouling of a keel cooler than a tube and shell or plate heat exchanger because the rate of flow past a keel cooler is very slow and at some speeds the water may even be stopped or moving forward along the hull, in that situation oil can stick to the tubes and reduce cooling.

The sky is not falling on boats, the oil is not destroying engines. The oil is not several feet thick and it is not lurking as a layer of tar just beneath the surface.

I was informed by my local outboard yard that Yanaha has advised it will not honor warranties on engines run through the oil. I am wondering what Cat and Yanmar have to say since those are the other engines that we run

Marmot,
I'm basing some of my concerns on what I observed on a news program. A reporter dipped a piece of plastic into the Gulf and pulled up a clump of oil, as thick or thicker than molasses. He held it up, tilting it where you would expect it to flow off the plastic, but it just hung there, not moving.
The oil may be spewing out of the broken well, but what exactly happens to that oil over time as it transits the Gulf is unclear. I've seen the sheen, tar balls, streams of brownish-red oil and this clump of assumed oil. As we have never had a disaster like this before, do we really know what to expect? Perhaps the quantity of oil in the Gulf is changing the attributes of it. You're correct that engines with a heat exchanger are not passing raw water through the block. But on many boats it passes through an oil cooler, heat exchanges and out the exhaust. What happens to that oil inside the exhaust manifold when temps are hot? Does is crystalize or create a layer of sludge that builds up around the water jackets? I think there are too many variables to say for certain what will happen either way, so we must err on the side of caution. Even the engine builders don't know what will happen and are covering their butts. Shoot, I would too. We need to be prudent in our decision making as it might come back to bite us later on. Don't want to have to pay for a rebuilt engine of it was avoidable.
Perhaps the keel coolers are warm enough to keep the oil from adhering to them?
Just my $0.02.

You have just observed the principle on which most of the oil skimmers in the world are built.

http://www.abanaki.com/

We have had a (so far) larger spill of the same type of crude in the same waters that lasted nearly a year, and except for the press coverage nothing is any different now other than the internet.