Chichester Yacht Club Magazine June 2018 | Page 17

It is a very effective method of
alerting vessels and shore
stations of distress, and when
registered and linked to a GPS,
provides enough information to
send a response. DSC is digital
and therefore has a greater
range, normally alerting
everyone within 30 miles of the
caller’s position.
Have you checked
your Raw Water
Impeller recently?
If you have any size of inboard
or stern drive marine engine or
a medium to large outboard,
you will almost certainly have
a raw water impeller in the
cooling system. If your engine
is serviced professionally then this should be
part of the procedure, but for those of us who
carry out our own maintenance it can be
missed, forgotten or delayed until next time.
The little rubber impeller is
vital to the operation of your
engine and if it fails then at
best your discharge water
will stop and you can stop
the engine to investigate. Or
the blades can disappear
into the heat exchanger,
block the ports, the engine
overheats and ...
I was sent this picture
recently of a fellow club
member’s experience (it
had been working fine when
he shut the engine down a
few days before) and it
made me check mine, a job
I had put off earlier in the
season.
I was lucky that only one of my vanes was
damaged, but I changed it and made sure I
had a spare on board!
17