I have some wonderful tales to relate, but I might as well get the bad stuff over with first. (The pic at least is a happy one! Mike, Tessa, Kathy, Nancy and Jeff on the beach)

I remember that a posting or two ago, I talked about like attracting like, and being positive and all that sort of thing. Well, I am still concentrating on the positive, but I've come around to working with a different metaphor. Despite the focus on the positive, bad things have still been happening. So now I'm thinking that the pendulum has had a very long swing over to the negative side and we might as well make the best of it. Sooner or later, it just has to swing to the positive again because that's the way pendulums work.

We dinghied to the dock at Harbourside Marina in Marsh Harbour on Tuesday evening for Happy Hour with Nancy and Jim (Solitaire), Mike and Kathy (Sapphire), Jeff and Tessa (Inamorata) and Bev and Bob (Savage Son). After an evening of lively debate on a number of topics, we returned to the dinghy to find that it had floated under the dock and when the tide came up, it got stuck there. This happens to dinghies occasionally and we should have checked it more often, but on the early checks all was well and then we got involved in talking and ...

It was well and truly stuck, with our brand new outboard motor jammed under a stringer beneath the dock - the body of the motor on one side and the tiller on the other. The tide still had another hour to go up and the pressure was forcing the aforementioned Brand New Motor under water. We first tried deflating the dinghy and that helped but not enough. After much pushing and shoving and angst and with assistance from our fellow partiers, we got it out, but not without shearing off the kill button on the tiller. With no little red button there, we couldn't start it either. Bob towed us back to our boat that night, and Jim A towed Jim B to the dock the next morning to see if the fellow at Abaco Suzuki could fix it. We could have cried. For me, it was one more thing in a run of bad things. For Jim, it was like having a new car get scratched or dented. This was his lovely new outboard.

Anyway, the Abaco Suzuki guy couldn't find the right button for the Yamaha, but he did find something to rig up instead so we can start and stop it, and we'll get the proper part later.

The other repair Jim had to do was to our macerator pump - that pumps waste out of our holding tank. The old one didn't seem to be pumping and when he opened the service kit that he had bought and stored away for just such a time, he discovered that some of the parts weren't in the box. Of course there were no parts to be had, so he had to buy a whole new pump. While I did laundry, he did the repair. It seemed to go well but there was a lingering odour of eau de sewer on the boat for the next couple of days. We pumped out the tank and flushed out the bilge again and again. Finally, we pulled up the floor and examined all the fittings and hoses. We disconnected the vent (that involves me squeezing down into the stern locker and unfastening the hose that goes to the outside of the boat - because I fit there better than Jim does) and connected it all up again. Once it was all cleaned up, the smell was better but still not great. Surely if we keep putting bilge cleaner down the bilge and deodorizers in the holding tank, it will eventually disappear. That's one of the issues of living on a boat - the water, fuel and septic tanks are all right under our living space.

Jim took our SSB to Merlin's Electronics to see if maybe it could be repaired or at the very least find out what was wrong with it. He got the answer to that. It is fried and probably unfixable.

So I think that is it for this next installment of Our Troubles. We are no further ahead on solving the big WHY of all the electrical problems. That can wait till we're back in the states.

And so the pendulum swings.