Skip, The engine should not need to "catch his breath". It is not alive. This is a fault. All boat engines should be able to run at cruising power indefinitely, and a well designed installation should be able to run a full power indefinitely..
I take it the engine is overheating. This is usually caused by not enough flow of the cooling fluids. Typically the seawater circuit is designed to be adequate when first built. Building it bigger costs more. But in the real world in time a little bit of restriction from sea life, corrosion or just glop anywhere in the circuit, seawater or freshwater, will reduce flow and cause overheating. Sometimes you can just throttle back or shut down and sail, but sometimes you are in a position where it would be dangerous to do that. BTW, a diesel engine should run around 170-180 deg F. My 180 hp engine has 2" seacocks and hoses in the seawater circuit. The smallest passage is 1 1/2". I have had overheating problems, but each was a definite fault. Twice the pressure cap leaked. I throttled down the first time and got to port. There I bought two new radiator caps, one for the engine and one for the spare. The freshwater circuit must be pressurized to keep hot spots from boiling. Sometimes the seawater strainer was plugged. I have a dual setup so all I had to do was to switch and then clean. Overheating is a fault. The engine should not have to "rest". It is a collection of metal parts, not an animal. Norm S/V Bandersnatch Lying Julington Creek 30 07.695N 081 38.484W > Oops. Getting dark, and the tide's in strong ebb. On comes > Perky for the last mile or so in order to not dock in the dark. > He doesn't like extended flat-out running, so he complained a > bit. Shutting him down for a couple (literally) of minutes while > I sailed on the genny alone let him catch his breath, and we > docked entirely uneventfully. _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
