“Open Coil Blues”
Verse 1
The beacon kept on flashin’ through another midnight round,
But that old gray re-entrant never made a single sound.
One-twenty on the input, just like it oughta be,
But somewhere in that circuit was a silent mystery.
Pulled the covers off the module, checked every wire and lead,
The meter told a story only engineers could read.
Three point nine was dancing where a warning should’ve cried,
Something down inside that horn had already up and died.
Pre-Chorus
You can’t fool a Fluke meter, it don’t lie to a man,
It’ll tell you where the trouble is if you’ve got the nerve to stand.
Chorus
It was an open coil, not a broken dream,
A silent little failure hiding in the scheme.
Swapped another horn and she came back alive,
Sometimes all the answers are a meter and some time.
From the engine room to sunrise, chasing every clue,
That’s the life we live… singing these Open Coil Blues.
Verse 2
DIP switches all were set just exactly where they should,
UTM was doing everything we knew it could.
Yellow wire, black wire, nothing left to guess,
OL on the display spelled out the whole mess.
Borrowed one from starboard just to prove what we all knew,
Bolted it together and that siren cut right through.
Now the paperwork is waiting and procurement gets the call,
One bad voice coil brought the whole alarm to stall.
Bridge
Every scar upon these knuckles tells another tale,
From UPS fires to diesel pumps that fail.
We don’t quit because it’s hard, we don’t walk away,
We keep these ships alive another working day.
Final Chorus
It was an open coil, the culprit all along,
A silent piece of copper where there should’ve been a song.
Order one replacement and another for the shelf,
’Cause out here on the ocean you learn to trust yourself.
When the meter says “OL,” you know exactly what to do…
Another day, another fix, another Open Coil Blues.
Outro
Yeah… she’s singing loud again where the silence used to be…
