3rd January

12 00 N
61 46 W

Weather; sunny, wind n/a, waves n/a

Another day spent doing not very much. Lorie had heard rumors that the Brewery was going to opening back up this week, we could but hope! Dale called them at a reasonable hour to find out if the rumor was true, hoping that it was so that we could do our Sunday thing and go there for brunch, buy a few things at their market stalls and have a few drinks and watch whatever sport was being shown on the big screens. After making the call to the brewery he let us know that sadly the rumor wasn't quite true - they weren't opening just yet, they were waiting for the directives from the government which were due for review today so sadly there was no trip to the brewery for us to while away the day, fingers crossed for next week! That left us with the whole day to pretend we had things to do.
Gerry had just one job that he needed to get done and it dated back over a year so it was probably about time! We had our engine overhauled in Florida before we began this trip as we wanted to make sure that it would make the journey with as few problems as possible, after all it is the original, almost 30 year old engine and at the time of the overhaul had some 7600 hours on the clock. As part of the overhaul a new engine and gear box oil cooler was installed (that's the one you can see in the photo). The old oil cooler was still in fairly good condition so Gerry had decided that we would keep it as a "spare" just in case there was an issue further down the track and it has sat inside one of the storage spaces ever since. At the time it was changed out they didn't bother with cleaning it up and Gerry had decided that now was the time to give it some love and make sure that it was clear of "gunk" should the need to use it arise. We had to dig around in the storage space to reach the darn thing - it was in the engine spares box, there's a surprise, which has all sorts of wonderful bits that we hope to never have to use. So out it came along with some masking tape and the muriatic acid (what would we do without gallons of this stuff?) and Gerry took over the kitchen sink - again! He taped up all but one of the hose holes, poured the acid into the only remaining open hole, swished it around for a while, left it until it stopped bubbling and then emptied it all out, gunk, scale and all - not that there was a great deal, but every little counts and could potentially block the thing. Next came a rinse to make sure that all the acid was out of it and finally it was left to dry with the masking tape removed before one final inspection of it, which Gerry was happy with, and we were able to put it back in the spares box - never to see the light of day again (fingers crossed). The job for the day was done and we had nothing else on the agenda so we whiled away the rest of the day reading our books, examining the backs of our eyelids, navel gazing and doing computer stuff. Gerry had proposed that we have steak for dinner, he never mentioned how it was to be cooked and the sun remained out long enough for us to BBQ it, but just to prove that the rain knows about BBQs it began to rain just as he took the steaks off and brought them down below to dish up! They were delicious by the way. So yet another quiet day for the start of 2021, not that we really want too much excitement in our lives we are quite content to sit enjoying the sun, the harbor views and watching for the turtles to appear.