A Day In Port
02 May 2012
86 degrees yesterday
May 2, 2012
It is rare for Bear and especially Scurv to sleep beyond the time when I get up. Could it be that I am noisy? Anyway, this was one of those mornings and the crew were asleep for an hour after I got up. We spent yesterday, starting early, in the maintenance of the engine cooling system. For the life of me, I cannot imagine what the assembly guys were thinking when they put a steel plug into a cast iron engine block. That is what they did for the engine coolant drain plug. It would not come out so I had to devise another way to flush the engine. The truth of the effort was that the alternative method was a messy job. It is a good thing that Beneteau built an engine sump into the system to catch drippings such as two gallons of goo previously known as anti-freeze. Again, a thirty minute job took several hours.
We managed to unship the 15 hp outboard we purchased years ago for the cruise. That engine is just too big for us. Why? First and most important, it weighs well over a hundred pounds. Secondly, we do not need to do 25 knots tearing around the anchorage. Simply put, we cannot take the beating. Third, it hangs on the same side of the boat where our generator is. That makes for a starboard list of about 2 degrees. Fact is that we find no reason to have an outboard that big since we are highly unlikely to challenge breaking surf on some remote beach or haul a half ton of provisions. Our solution was to procure a 6 horsepower outboard that is less than half the weight of the 15. It will propel our dink much faster than we sail or motor on the boat.
We have been at this marina about three weeks and that is long enough for Scruv to worm his way into the live aboard community here. Everyone knows his name and most stop to speak to him on the foredeck or while walking. Not much conversation is directed toward me so that tells me something. While we have the same color hair, he is way cuter and smarter so I am viewed as the lug that Scurv takes for a walk. We now know that the cabin rugs have a finite life highly dependent on how bored Scurv is when we leave him along below. He can actually extract individual threads and takes great pride in “unweaving” rugs. Maybe he is a purist that does not believe in such things below.
Picture of the Monument to the Yorktown Victory