The Engine Starts. I Actually Cried a Little.
Saturday, 31 January 2026 — Port Whitby Marina, Whitby, Ontario
Wind: SW 14 knots. Air temp: −4 °C (warmest we’ve had since Christmas). Lake Ontario: 0.4 m swell, occasional whitecaps beyond the harbour mouth. Thin ice on inner basin, breaking up.
She started.
Persistence — our tired, neglected, previously-badly-tuned 1981 CS 33 — started her Yanmar 2GM20 diesel engine on the afternoon of Saturday, 31 January 2026, and I did not handle it with the composure you might expect from a man who grew up around boats.
I had been telling myself for two months that it was just an engine. Engines start when they’re properly maintained. There was nothing emotionally significant about this moment.
I was wrong.
What Max Did in January
I’m going to summarise here because Max has written the full technical account in his Mechanical Dispatch (linked at the bottom). But for the log, the work done this month was:
Raw water pump: new seal fitted, new impeller installed (two spares now in the parts bin — Max’s standing rule is always carry two). Raw water cooling circuit flushed, heat exchanger inspected and cleared, new sacrificial zincs fitted throughout.
Throttle cable: properly replaced. A Morse 33C cable, correct termination, correctly routed and secured. Max showed me the old cable-tie-and-electrical-tape arrangement before he binned it. It was, in his words, “inspired but not endorsed.”
Fuel injector timing: I asked Max to explain what had been wrong and he did, in full, and I understood perhaps 60% of it. The short version is that the previous owner had attempted to advance the timing to get more performance and had overshot, which was causing incomplete combustion and that characteristic of the engine that I had been describing as “a bit rattly” and Max had been describing as “noticeably wrong.”
It is no longer rattly.
Chartplotter connection: found, fixed. A corroded Dupont connector at the back of the distribution panel. Max cleaned it, re-terminated it, applied dielectric grease. The chartplotter now works on days other than Tuesday.
VHF radio: new Standard Horizon HX890 handheld purchased as backup pending a decision on a proper fixed-mount unit. The old radio continues to work when dry. We will replace it in spring.
The Start
By 3 PM on the 31st, Max had declared himself satisfied. He went through his checklist — cooling water intake open, raw water flow confirmed, gear in neutral, kill switch in — and then he just looked at me and said: “Go ahead.”
I turned the key.
There was the sound of the starter motor. Then a cough. Then — and I can still hear it — the specific, quiet, authoritative idle of a properly timed two-cylinder marine diesel. Steady. Even. Satisfied with itself.
I sat in the companionway and listened to it for about thirty seconds without saying anything.
Billy, who had been standing on the dock, knocked twice on the hull.
Max looked at the temperature gauge, the oil pressure gauge, checked the raw water flow at the exhaust. Everything nominal. He gave a thumbs up.
It was −4 °C and the lake was slate grey and the whole marina smelled of diesel and winter, and I thought: this is it. This is the moment it stops being a project and starts being a boat.
What February Looks Like
The standing rigging inspection is next. Max has been reading about swageless fittings and fatigue failure more than is probably healthy, and has strong opinions about the forestay which he will document properly. The short version is: we will probably replace the standing rigging before the 2026 season. It’s 40-year-old wire. The prudent call is to replace it.
The interior is getting attention this month. The head compartment has been comprehensively addressed — I’m saying no more about the previous condition — and we are sourcing new upholstery for the saloon. I’ve found a canvas shop in Oshawa who does marine upholstery and I’m going in with dimensions next week.
Billy has been quietly building out the passage plan for our first sail. He won’t tell me the exact route yet — he says he wants to “wait for the March forecast” before committing, which I respect intellectually and find very frustrating practically. What I do know is that it involves going east from Whitby along the north shore, which is the direction of Cobourg and Brighton and the beginning of the stretch of Lake Ontario that starts to feel genuinely remote.
I’ve been spending one evening a week on the boat since January. Sometimes with Max, sometimes with Billy, sometimes alone. I sit at the teak table with the propane heater going and I read, or I work through the engine manual, or I just sit. There’s a sound a boat makes at the dock in winter — the creak of the dock lines, the lap of water at the hull, the occasional distant clang of a loose halyard on someone else’s mast — and I am, I realise, addicted to it.
My wife has started calling the marina “the other house.” This is both accurate and slightly ominous.
A Lake Ontario Note
The end of January on Lake Ontario is not the end of winter — far from it, February and March can be some of the worst months for cold and for ice in sheltered harbours. But there are days, like the 31st, when the wind comes southwest and the temperature lifts just above the minus-single-digits, and you can feel the season turning at its edges.
The ice in the inner basin was breaking up that afternoon. Small plates of it drifting slowly toward the harbour mouth and out onto the open lake. The water beyond was dark and cold and absolutely enormous — Lake Ontario on a grey February day looks less like a lake and more like a small grey sea, which in some moods is intimidating and in others is exactly right.
We stood on the dock after the engine test, the three of us, watching the ice drift out. Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.
Sailing season is two and a half months away, give or take. There is a lot still to do.
But the engine starts.
— Captain Sam
SBM Offshore Adventures
📍 Port Whitby Marina, Whitby, ON
Next up: Max’s full Mechanical Dispatch on the Yanmar 2GM20 restoration, and Billy’s weather briefing for the Lake Ontario spring sailing window.
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