I just finished working on my 2018 tax returns. Good news: refunds will help pay for boat parts.

I have a new appreciation for ripping out fingernails as a form of torture. This is based on a recent experience I had jamming a screwdriver into my thumb.

The fact that I injured my right thumb is peculiar, in that I am right handed, so obviously I was holding the piece in my right hand, and applying force with my left. Not only that, but I was watching myself doing this and was consciously aware that I should account for where the screwdriver blade would go if it slipped. It is also peculiar in that this is the second time in recent memory that I injured my right thumb.

The first time was in Taiohae Bay (on Nuku Hiva, in French Polynesia) when I was replacing bearings and bushings in my Monitor wind vane steering unit. This autopilot is an amazing device. It requires no power, so doesn�'t draw down the batteries, and relieves us from having to constantly steer during our passages of days and weeks. Being such an essential contributor to quality of life, I need it to work, and when I noticed the plastic parts were starting to show signs of aging and embrittlement, I decided to perform preventative maintenance. The purpose of this part of the narrative is to take credit for good judgement.

There�'s a ¾�" stainless pendulum shaft that you have to remove from the pendulum strut (this after unshipping the whole thing from the transom and getting it down below, which it just barely fits through the companionway). The manual says you use a ¾�" wooden dowel to push the shaft through the strut. This is great, because my repair parts kit includes a ¾�" wooden dowel. In real life, however, the shaft and strut live in a marine environment which is constantly striving to demonstrate the point that there just is no such thing as stainless steel, and that entropy rules the universe. In real life, one must rely on the �'judicial application of force�'. Once I discovered that I could not �'push�' the shaft through the strut, by hand, with the wooden dowel, I got out the �'soft�' hammer, and discovered that the dowel would fail before the shaft would move. This discovery was occasioned by the visual observation of cracks forming in the dowel. I gave up on the dowel and scrounged up a ¾�" bolt. I again applied the hammer, first with the rubber head and then with the nylon head. What I discovered at this step was that the hammer heads, both rubber and nylon, were deforming in preference to �'pushing�' the rod through the strut. So I got out the ball peen hammer and applied it to the bolt. Here I discovered that the threaded end of the bolt was starting to deform, which would render the bolt useless as a bolt, per se, but given the general paucity of resources available, I determined to persist with the bolt and ball peen hammer, and I decided to apply more force with the hammer.

Heretofore, I had been limited in the force I could apply by the geometry of the the components and how the pieces were constrained. I had this rather large and cumbersome assembly of tubes and blocks and gears and struts and pendulums and so forth propped on one of the settees in the main cabin, which is to say, the foam padded cushions around the table. The trick is to hold and support the Monitor structure, preferably with both hands, and hold the bolt in perfect alignment with the shaft with another hand, and accurately swing the hammer so that it strikes precisely in line with the bolt and shaft with yet another hand. In real life, there was only room for two hands. Also in real life, the hammer never swings in exactly the precise arc you were hoping for, no matter how many hands are involved, and Newton�'s Third Law, as applied to this situation, dictates that the energy transferred from the hammer to the Monitor will be not go just to pushing the shaft through the strut, but will be distributed to moving the whole Monitor structure, and some of the force will be absorbed by the cushions. It turned out, in this particular instance, that some of the force was also absorbed by my thumb. I have had a dime-sized purple spot in my right thumbnail for months. As I cut my fingernails from week to week, the purple spot migrated to the edge of the nail, and then waned from a �'full moon�' spot to a gibbous and finally crescent spot, and it was just last week that I finally cut away the last of the purple nail. So obviously I was all ready for a new event.

This time I was working on my outboard motor. (My little Tohatsu continuously brings to mind the outboard motor which is one of the principal characters in Steinbeck�'s Sea of Cortez, and I should no doubt write more about the relationship I am forming with my motor. But this blog is about my thumb.) I had to replace the motor mount brackets because the clamp screws had both lost their pads, so the pointy-end of the clamp screws worked at punching holes through the dinghy transom. And one of the screws had stripped the hole in the bracket, so it wouldn�'t tighten at all and only one of the clamp screws was holding the motor on the transom. This isn�'t as bad as it sounds, as long as you didn�'t try to make a sharp turn at anything above idle. If you do, the motor pivots on the clamp screw that did tighten, and gets all cock-eyed on the transom, so you have to stop, dig your 6�" crescent wrench out of your pocket (don�'t leave home without it!), loosen the only tight clamp screw, re-position the motor, taking care that is was still centered on the transom (helps with going straight), and then start again, while working on your colorful sailor-slash-small-motor-mechanic vocabulary.

So anyway, I was working on my outboard. I had ordered parts, and waited for parts, and parts had finally arrived, so it was time.

Now parts are a big part of working on a boat, and being out in the middle of nowhere, commercially speaking, parts are a big pain in the ass. Majuro has three hardware stores, reasonably well stocked, but not too big in the marine department. Just like anywhere else, if you can�'t find your boat parts at the hardware store, look for them at the marine hardware store. Majuro has none. Majuro does have an outboard dealer and/or mechanic, but I never checked there, probably because of the sign.

In front of the shop, or shack, are two 2 x 4 posts, painted blue, supporting a plywood sign, painted white, with blue stenciled lettering, the letters being 3�" high. If you already cut your plywood, and are working with a fixed width, and you are working with stencils, which also have a fixed width for any given word. You can play a little with spacing between words, but you still end up with awkward line breaks.

BOAT GENERATOR OUTBOARD MOTOR REPAIR JAPANESE FOOD

I�'m going from memory here, and I can�'t remember the other three or four things on the sign, not of which are related to outboard motors, and which may or may not be related to boats, but the point is I decided to just pass by this shop and order my outboard parts online.

You�'re probably used to using the internet wherever you are, whenever you want to. You probably don�'t even think about it. I have to think about it. I have to plan for it. I have to go ashore. So that�'s a dinghy trip, which includes putting the motor on the dinghy, with a single clamp screw, and not turning sharply. Then you walk from the quote dinghy dock unquote to the hotel, where you can purchase wifi access. $5 will get you one hour on one device. $15 will get you 24 hours on two devices. There is no limit on the amount of data you can download, but bandwidth is not that great, so there is a practical limit. For example, downloading one episode of Homeland or Westworld takes about 90 minutes. Right. So, you make a trip ashore, and spend a couple hours at the hotel checking email, ordering parts, tracking parts, downloading TV shows, etc. I used to follow the news very closely, but not so much anymore.

Ordering parts for my outboard probably only took about 15 or 20 minutes, but probably felt more like a half hour or two. I don�'t really remember. How long it takes to order something depends on how fast your connection is that day, how much you�'ve already downloaded (I�'ve observed that data transfer slows down after the first gigabyte, always, any time of day), how the vendor�'s site is set up, how far down you have to drill to get a widget delivered to your cart, and how the shipping and payment details are handled. Boats.net opens up on it�'s home page, and you search from there. From the home page, you drill down to outboard motors, manufacturer, year, and model. Each one of those is a separate page, so you have the whole waiting for the page to load thing going on. I drink a lot of coffee while I check email, order parts, track parts, download movies, etc. Once I get down to outboard motors (not anchoring, electrical, accessories, apparel, etc.) to manufacturer (Tohatsu), year (2003) and model (M9.8B), boats.net delivers me to what is, essentially, the Tohatsu outboard motors parts list, complete with exploded view diagrams. This manual is 60 pages long. You drill down to the section of the manual (Cylinder-Crankcase Ass�'y, Piston-Crank Shaft, Inlet-Reed Valve, Carburetor, Magneto, Throttle Mechanism, Tiller Handle, etc.) and then down to your one specific part, and add it to your shopping cart. Then you can �'go to checkout�' or �'continue shopping�'. Fortunately, �'continue shopping�' leaves you in the parts list, so you don�'t have to start completely over. Sometimes I order assemblies, (e.g., tiller handle assembly) not because I need the whole assembly, but because then I can order one assembly instead of 12 parts (washer; wave washer; stopper, steering handle; stud bolt; spring washer; nut; grommet, throttle cable; etc.). Eventually your cart contains everything you think you needed, unless, as sometimes happens, your internet time has exceeded your attention span and you forgot something. If you are a betting person, and they were making book on the need for, and size and cost of, the part(s) you forgot, you�'d want to bet that the part you forgot was 1) critical and essential, 2) small and (relatively) inexpensive), and 3), shipping would still cost as much as for all the other parts you ordered, let�'s say $20 or $30. And no, of course you can�'t combine orders, because that�'s not the way automated order fulfillment process work. I won�'t say much about checkout, except that the shipping address often complicates things.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is a �'Trust Territory�' of the United States. It is so because in the 1950s, the UN essentially gave it to the US as a place to test nuclear bombs, provided the US promised to take care of the people displaced and otherwise harmed by such testing. Comment on that �'Trust�' is a whole �'nother blog, if not a book. My point, for purposes of this blog, is that the Marshall Islands, as a Trust Territory, is served by the US Postal Service. The USPS being subsidized by myself and a few other US taxpayers (though I didn�'t help out as much this year as I usually do), it is the best deal going for shipping parts to this part of the world. In fact, t is the second reason I am here in this part of the Pacific Ocean. (The first reason is that I had to go north from where I was before to get out of hurricane season in the southern hemisphere.)

If you were to go to the USPS website and do the �'Click �'n Ship�' thing, you could create and pay for a mailing label from anywhere served by the USPS to anywhere served by the USPS. If you�'re mailing something to the Marshall Islands, you click �'MH�' from the list of states; for Majuro, you type in 96960 for the zip code. So far so good, but you also have to fill out a Customs form. No big deal, work-wise, about the same amount of information you have to fill out for insurance. But, of course, some vendors don�'t ship USPS (only UPS or FedEx) and some don�'t ship outside the continental US, not even to Alaska or Hawaii. And quite a few don�'t ship to the Marshall Islands. Sometimes you don�'t find this out until after you�'ve completed checkout (entering shipping address, billing address, credit card info, etc) and your order is rejected instead of confirmed. I drink a lot of coffee when I�'m ordering parts. Unless I�'m doing an afternoon internet session, in which case I drink a lot of beer. Either way, ordering parts always involves at least one trip to the bathroom. Anyway, if it turns out you can�'t get your parts shipped to Majuro, you ship them to your mail service in Seattle. This way, you get to pay for shipping from the vendor to Seattle, and shipping and handling, from Seattle to Majuro.

Tracking parts is a part of the process, too. Priority Mail, the best deal going, takes 10 to 21 days from the mainland to Majuro. It�'s important to know when the USPS says your package is available for pickup, because the Marshall Islands Postal Authority may not know this. Long story short, thinking your package is available for pick up, it still may take a couple of trips to the Post Office to actually pick it up. And the moral of the story is, once you�'ve been drinking coffee (or beer) for an hour or two, and get your parts ordered, it will still be a while before you get your parts.

But I digress. Back to the thumb.

I was working on my outboard motor mount brackets. I had the parts. I had the old brackets apart, corroded fasteners notwithstanding. I had the new brackets ready, the new clamp screw pads assembled to their clamp screws. I was almost done. Except for one rather recalcitrant spring in the starboard bracket. There wasn�'t much corrosion, and I�'d sprayed it and brushed it. The spring was nice and springy, seemed free to move, just didn�'t want to come off the post around which it rotated. (Yes, it was a torsion spring, for the tilt stopper.) Time for judicious application of force! The bracket fits easily in my hand, so a screw driver is the force applicator of choice. As I was working the blade between individual coils and otherwise prepping for the main force event, I took notice that I was holding the bracket in my right hand and applying the tool with my left. This should have been a red flag and alarm bell moment, as I am right handed. Instead, I was thinking how nicely ambidextrous I am becoming. Self-satisfaction with respect to ambidexterity may also have interfered with recognizing and taking account of the path the screw driver blade would take if if slipped from the point of contact on the torsion spring/post as judicious, or possibly non-judicious, force was applied.

As it happened, the path it took was from the point of contact toward my right thumb. The blade contacted the edge of my thumbnail, on the side away from my forefinger. From there, it apparently transversed the length of the nail, between the nail and the thumb. It exited at the base of the nail, having displaced the cuticle in the process. I could see the bottom corner of my thumbnail. I had never seen that before.

Surprisingly, there was hardly any blood, so the visual impact was only a tiny fraction of the pain impact. Kirsten was in the water. She�'d been on SCUBA cleaning the lower part of the keel and rudder, and, as luck would have it, had just surfaced to clean or adjust her mask or some such. I had exchanged a few words with her as I was admiring my ambidexterity, and, as luck would have it, she was still hanging onto the side of the dinghy when I was suddenly and painfully confronted with the real world. I then with typical coolness under fire said, �"I�'m sorry to make you get out of your gear, but I need your help.�" (Remember, she�'s got tank, regulator, BC, weights, fins, etc.). I then sat down, on the verge of passing out.

As blood flow returned to my brain, I thought, geez, now I know why they tear out fingernails as a form of torture. It really frigging hurts.

Now I know.

I wonder how long it will take before my thumbnail grows out past the damage this time �....