Engine repair day!
23 May 2012 | Middle of the Pacific Ocean
Ron
The engine is still giving us trouble, but we have a few reasonable workarounds. They aren't GOOD workarounds and so I think Sean decided to raise the priority of this ticket to "High". Sean and Scott, with a little of my help, ripped apart most of the fuel systems of the engine today looking for the cause of our fuel starvation problem. No luck yet. We have some fresh ideas for tomorrow, though. And, because we had decent wind all day, we made good progress even without the motor. Me, I'm definitely more on the electronics side, so I got to observe more than anything else. And supervise, although they didn't realize I was doing that!
Today was shower day. One of the steps in getting the shower ready is to cover the binnacle, basically the instrument panel in front of the steering wheel, because we shower right behind there. I asked where the binnacle cover was, and Sean told me it was in the lazarette "on top". So, trusting Sean, I took out the cover on top, and assumed it was the binnacle cover, only to find it was the main sail cover. It didn't fit very well. Sean said I had to blog about this. Can you believe the mistake he made? :-)
Because we did so much sailing over the past few days, we are back to babying the generator today as well. As Sean says, everything is "just barely working", and the generator is no exception. Nothing is easy it seems. But we're cranking 90 amps into our system as I type.
We have another few days of northeast travel, then we are supposed to turn east. Once we do, the winds are supposed to be behind us, and we should really get some speed. We're all a little nervous about the forecast, but with some luck we will start making some good time once above the pacific high.
Last night's movie was "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". I was good. I'll let you guess who was bad and who was ugly from the remaining two candidates.
For food today, we ate english muffins with cream cheese and/or PB (thanks to Scott), turkey burgers (me), and Sean is preparing his specialty "Seanage Sausage" for dinner, which is some kind of rice dish. He keeps mumbling something about the sausage being frozen, so I'm getting worried! At least we're able to cook every meal because the ocean is actually pretty calm.