Friday, January 20, 2012

Well, the bilge pump kicked on at 2am this morning so I laid there listening to it and couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour. I am glad that the pump works, to be sure…

Mark showed up a little after 8am to work on the leaky impeller/water pump. After he got it apart, we could see that the O Ring was pinched between the cover & plate. Not conducive to a dry boat. He had also noticed that our packing at the cutlass bearing was dripping more than it should be and tightened that too. So after 3 hours work, then lunch and another hour, we now should have no leaking problem. Fingers crossed.

Wayne moved on to working on the windlass and I began the process of splicing the halyard. How quickly I forgot… after reading through the sheet and looking at the diagrams, I scratched my head in wonder then started pulling the core through the cover. I then marked it all off and in doing so, discovered that I’d pulled the core of the rope out through the wrong spot. I tried to push it back into the casing to no avail so a foot of our new halyard needs to come off. I think I’ll wait and restart the whole thing tomorrow. I think I’ve lost patience for the day…

Oh - Marine Max called while we were both working on windlass and halyard. Good timing with Wayne’s hands all gooped up and me counting strands in the rope. They think they’ve discovered our problem with the little 5hp Mercury outboard. After rebuilding the carburetor and ordering a diaphragm for the fuel pump, they still had problems. (It’s become a challenge for their mechanics. They work on all these huge engines all day long and now are stymied by our little 5 hp… it’s become a big challenge…) Anyhow, they discovered a broken needle or something and think that’s the problem – one of two needles in the controller are broken. The place where they send the parts out of Atlanta Georgia isn’t open on Fridays. Sooooo they won’t get parts until Wednesday or Thursday. They are pretty confident that they’ve finally found the problem though. At $100/hr labor we probably could have gotten a new motor by now and been done with it… They say it’s the challenge though and said they weren’t going to charge us the 2 hours that the guy has into it already… What? Only 2 hours into it? They said that it looked like whoever worked on it put it together backwards…
Time to make a nice large salad for dinner….

Maybe a G/T with it…

Maybe 2 G/Ts with it…