We spent all day at the Gizo Hotel today, literally all day. We came in for breakfast at around 9:30, then had lunch and then dinner at 6:30PM. We had so much to catch up on in cyberspace. I think I was on the Internet for over 8 hours. We are all caught up on Christmas shopping now.

The Gizo Hotel dinghy dock is the nicest dock in town, but crowded. We found a good spot closest in to shore on the side where the main wharf is that seemed to be open everyday. Most of the dock is taken up by hotel shuttle boats and the like. There are some partially submerged stern lines and other debris that you have to watch out for as you trawl into the area.

It was Sunday here but in between email and paying bills I stopped by Solomon Air to pick up the Westerbeke parts we had shipped in. The shipping was expensive but not too bad considering. We went DHL to Honiara from Los Angeles, and then the DHL folks put the packages on Solomons Air to Gizo. There are a lot of wonderful folks around here and many, such as Helen at DHL, don't think twice about spending their own money to make things happen. Helen paid for the Solomon Air shipping, when they would not do COD.

When we got back to the boat at around 8PM I installed the new fresh water pump and heat exchanger. I was worried that there would be one little bolt or gasket missing. Surprisingly we had everything we needed.

I was not happy that the heat exchanger had failed in the first place (taking the water pump with it). The genset had less than 2,000 hours on the meter and was less than 3 years old. It has been babied its entire life. I noticed an additional feature of the new heat exchanger, a ground post. Hmmmm. So, per the label, I grounded the new heat exchanger back to the engine block with a heavy piece of copper wire. My old heat exchanger developed a premature leak from the fresh to the salt side and the new one shows up with a grounding post to protect against galvanic corrosion... coincidence?

After a few hours of work putting everything together and adding coolant we had the genset up and running. It ran great for a minute and then there was a problem with Leg2 and the battery charger cut off. This had happened before and I was never sure what was going on, having bigger fish to fry. On a roll, I tore into the AC panel. After some inspection I discovered a number of slightly loose wires, one burned, the Leg2 AC input. So I cleaned that up, cut off the old end and stripped back some fresh clean wire. I tightened everything up really well and checked all of the connections with a multi-meter.

After making sure that everything checked out we fired up the genset for a few hours. We cranked the AirCon, ice maker, bat charger, hot water heater and thought about making espresso. It was midnight by this time so we skipped the espresso but did watch an episode of Enterprise.