{"id":6515,"date":"2025-07-30T06:07:34","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T10:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/?p=6515"},"modified":"2025-08-03T05:30:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T09:30:38","slug":"christinas-world-2-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/?p=6515","title":{"rendered":"Smoke on the Water"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I often write about amazing scenery, wildlife, nature, people and experiences during this cruise. There’s a darker side to cruising, however. When critical equipment fails, it can be very disruptive. I mentioned our friends who’ve been stranded on an island for weeks waiting for a new rudder.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

We haven’t had anything that dramatic happen but we did have a series of mishaps over the last two days.<\/span><\/p>

WARNING: This post is a little technical.<\/span><\/p>

Cruising sailboats have engines to travel when there’s insufficient wind, or for tricky port manoevers that can’t be done under sail. When sailing, the water flowing over the propeller can make it spin because of the same physics that allow it to propel the boat when the engine is on. <\/span>This can cause noise, vibration, and wear on other mechanical parts along the drive train, such as the cutlass bearing, shaft seal and transmission.<\/span><\/p>

To avoid this, Amel designed in a shaft brake, depicted in the introduction. It’s a disk with calipers. When sailing, the calipers squeeze the disk, stopping the shaft rotation. When motoring, the brake releases, allowing the motor to drive the propeller. <\/span>This is achieved by using the fluid pressure in the engine’s transmission to engage or disengage the brake.<\/span><\/p>

Those who followed our blog last year will remember that it never effectively stopped the propeller from spinning. We had it repaired of the winter. It worked well for a month. <\/span>Then, when leaving Boothbay Harbor Monday in a thick fog, we smelled smoke. The calipers engaged when they shouldn’t have \u00a0(the greater evil vs. not engaging when they should) and siezed the disk, leading to the caliper pads burning from the friction.<\/span><\/p>

Once we cleared the smoke out of the engine room, I made adjustments to disengage the brake. There was not enough brake pad thickness left, so the propeller is once again spinning under sail.<\/span><\/p>

Many other Amel owners have had similar problems with the shaft brake. Some have removed it altogether and replaced the propeller with one that feathers under sail so that it doesn’t spin. <\/span>Amel has adopted a feathering propeller on newer models and discontinued the shaft brake.<\/span><\/p>

After fighting with it for two seasons, I’ve decided to eliminate it, and replace the propeller with a feathering one. <\/span>Smoke on the water is scary!<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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We interrupt this blog about beautiful scenery and experiences to talk about a darker side of cruising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2025-new-england"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6515"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6694,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6515\/revisions\/6694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sailingfregata.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}