Today was the day we'd planned on getting out of Steinhatchee. We ventured out into the channel, and part of the way through, my dad felt vibrations from the boat that weren't normal. He'd tightened a coupling on the engine and replaced the packing yesterday, and we'd run the engine at cruise speed (still tied to the dock) to run the packing in. I guess that when he tightened the coupling, he either didn't tighten it enough or tightened it too much. I don't know. Whatever the case may be, it caused the vibrating, and we had to turn around and head back to the dock. By the time we got back (the short forray into the channel and then heading back around took nearly two hours) it would have been too late for my dad to fix the coupling and then get us running again so that we could head out, again. So, we are back. Again.
However, we have good weather through Sunday (Y'all keep prayin for good weather!) so we'll be able to leave tomorrow morning.
I don't know when my next post will be, so wish us luck in our travels!
Love,
Annakah on Kama Hele

Dirt dwellers: Packing is sort of a cotton hard-packed into a ring-shape, and packed around the propeller shaft at the point where the shaft exits the hull underwater. The shaft is what the propeller is attached to. This substance (it's not always cotton; apparently there are hemp, aramid, teflon, and asbestos rings, too) keeps water out of the boat while allowing the propeller to turn on the shaft.
A coupling alters the vibrations of the shafts' rotation. (I actually didn't know what that was, I had to cheat and use Wikipedia. There goes the hope that I'm secretly a mechanical genius.)