Having an odd issue, MTU blue line

16V2000M91 with Blue Line controls

I started getting a couple of occasional glitches with the engines controls not activating right away when pressing the “command” buttons on any of the three controls (pilot house and both sides of aft deck).

Then today a couple of hours into crossing to Cat Cay, the PH control beeped, RPM dropped to idle and gear went to neutral. Pressed “command” again and it worked fine for 20/25 minutes and it’s been getting worst from there.

After clearing in Cat Cay I ended up running the engines from the main panel in the ER in local mode. So far so good…

no error codes anywhere, no voltage drops, no messages. Nothing.

no work has been done which could have disrupted any wiring.

has anyone encountered this before? I ve been in touch with my MTU mechanic who is also checking with an MTU electronic specialist.

I don’t think all three controls woudl fail at the same time… tomorrow when we get there I m going to disconnect both aft deck controls just in case one of them would send a wrong signal. Then swap one of them with the helm.

Oh and to make things even more fun, I lost steering right as I was entering Gun Cay Cut! Quick fix as it turned out to be the pressure gauge on the Jastram hydraulic tank which popped a leak. Luckily it has a valve to isolate the gage so easy fix, I didn’t even have to hunt for a cap…

did the zig zag in the cut by radioing engine orders to the aft deck and assisting with the bow thruster.

And we still have clean up about 8 gallons of hydraulic fluid…

Never a dull day on the water…

Going to be a long trip if I get the controls back on line. We don’t dock much so we can handle the telegraph operations by anchoring the whole trip

that’s the plan tomorrow… We should get to Staniel around 3 am… at least both the Gulf Stream and the Nortwest channel were pretty good