Folk Dancer 27
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August 26, 2004
Jenny and I and some of our friends, Katie, Jenny and Wendy joined us for a Sunday sail and we joined them that evening at Brian Borus for dinner and drinks. The weather was perfect - calm seas, light winds and lots and lots of sun. We also meet up with our friends Niels and Tina, Alan, Aaron and his girlfriend, a friend of Niels and a friend of ours, Robin, who joined us after the sail. It was great to run into all these good friends.
A couple weeks ago my father helped me out with bleeding the diesel line of air and took us back and forth with his dinghy and faithful British Seagull 40 plus. I've known for some time about the simple, easy to maintain and repair British Seagull, but didn't take a lot of interest in them and other outboards until I got Gandalf and started rowing back and forth. She's located about a quarter mile from the dinghy dock and often a strong sea breeze will against us as we head out or in. Therefore, my interest in an outboard arose. And I put my sites on a British Seagull.
My father is a bit of a gear collector, a trait I have seemed to have inherited. I've seen a number of Seagulls in his workshop. From what I can recall he had the fairly new 40 plus, a larger Century 100 or Century Silver, a 170, and a non functioning 40 featherweight he found in the bilge of a boat he'd bought. After talking with him a length about British Seagull's and what he thought about them and that I was interested in finding one of my own, he gave me the 40 featherweight. I quickly went to work finding out as much as I could about the engine and British Seagull outboards in general. I was amazed to find all kinds of information online. After only a couple days work I managed to find out what kind of Seagull I had. My father had guessed that it was pretty old by the looks of it. It was in a bad way. The boat it had come off of was from South Africa and had spent quite a lot of time there and in the Caribbean. From the looks of it the Seagull had spent days and days on end in the ocean or in the bilge. After removing the drain/fill plug to the gearbox about half a cup of white sand came forth. She was destine for the parts bin. With some help from the many helpful and well informed Seagull parts suppliers and a number of websites, I found the the Seagull I had was made in 1981. Since I spend quite a bit of time looking online and in my local area for Seagulls on the market, and most times the person selling them have no real idea of what they are selling, I decided to make up a web page with all the pertinent information to identify the engine:
British Seagull - Identification Resource
Please feel free to link to this page, print it out for your own reference, or copy it down.
