Friday, April 3rd.
6 a.m., Jim's out getting everything he needs to dive under to see what's going on w/ the prop. The cutlass bearing was loose. When we beached the boat & changed the prop, Jim notice the cutlass bearing had slid out towards the propellar. So he pushed it back in to the prop shaft strut, & installed a zinc to keep it from coming back down. When he went under to check on it this morning, the cutlass bearing had worked it's way up away from the propellar. So he pushed the c.b. back in & installed a hose clamp on the shaft as close as possible to keep it in the strut & at least get us over to Playita, where it's easier to get to shore to Panama City to get parts. We got over to Playita anchorage around 9 a.m. & got ready to go to shore to run some of these much needed errands. We usually don't like to leave the boat so shortly after setting the anchor, but we really made sure she was held well, and we left around 11:30 after we got the boat ready to be "bombed" with bug bomb to get rid of any last lurking critters, although critters for these ones is a rather too friendly term, Jim calls them b-------, another 2 syllable word, but I'll leave it to your imagination since my children are going to be reading this! Although we see fewer & fewer ea. day, some days not even seeing any, but just to be safe we decided to do the fog. We were worried about our resident on board Gecho, Marco, as some of you may recall I've mentioned before, that he would be affected by our bombing, but don't worry kids, we've heard him since and he seems to be fine!