The Time Bandit, featured in the Discovery Channel series ‘The Deadliest Catch’, was repowered towards the end of last year.
The 113ft, black-hulled crab fishing vessel is co-captained by Andy and Jonathan Hillstrand, and operates in the Arctic seas, where crew launch and recover 1000-pound crab pots.
Time Bandit’s owners, Andy, Jonathan and younger brother Neal replaced the existing Cummins KTA19 engines with modern electronically-controlled Tier 2 certified Cummins QSK19-M engines – and they actually helped to build one of them at the Cummins factory in Seymour Indiana. Andy said, “The factory people probably checked it all over after we left. While at the factory we saw an engine that had been painted red so we got ours painted red also.” Since then Cummins has offered red as a paint option on all marine engines, in addition to the company’s traditional marine gray.
The engines were shipped to Kodiak where they were installed along with a new set of Cummins 6BT-series engines to power the pair of 125 kW gensets. While the genset repower was like-for-like they did increase the horsepower on each engine from 200 to 270HP. These have a hydraulic pump to power the chillers for summer salmon tendering and the big hydraulics for the crab block and crane for picking up pots. An electric-driven hydraulic pump located forward powers the heavy crab-pot launcher.
New engine installation was relatively straight forward as the KTA19 and the QSK19 have similar footprints. The engine beds were beefed up and some alignment issues dealt with. The existing Twin Disc 516 gears are rated for up to 800HP. The repower increased the output to each shaft from 425HP to 600HP. They rebuilt the stuffing boxes and overhauled the 4.5-inch shafts, but the only major change was the addition of new props.
For the repower, the original channel coolers built into the hull were replaced with Duramax keel coolers. Over the years, ice in the Bering Sea had taken a toll on the hull plating around the bow.
“Early 2012 was especially bad,” Andy said, “so we cut out the steel hull plate in the forward section and replaced it with new 5/16-inch plate. Then we wrapped 30-feet of 5/8-inch plate around the bow to form a nearly one-inch thick steel ice shield.”
