Well, as the title suggest, we have a new prop shaft and propeller: Northern Symphony can move under her own power again! But, I have to confess, I've been less than regular in updating this blog during the past week....a lapse I'm sure to regret and which more than a few people have grumped about!

Part of my excuse is that this has been a very domestic week for me: I've been "going to work" each morning which means logging into various computers, putting on my headset, spending hours on the phone and doing all my normal business stuff while the other three have gone off doing things. So, while I've been working on 2011 budget planning and reviewing employee performance reports, they've been off doing the sorts of things I should be reporting here...They visited the local YMCA for swims and showers, toured a woolen factory and the UFO museum, spent a day in the Acadian historic village(where the picture was taken), met up with a friend and spent a day hiking in Kejimkujik park! So we will try to keep our blog updated more frequently even when we are not moving.

On the boating side of things, after discovering that our shaft had broken and the prop was gone, I made a bunch of phone calls and found a prop exactly like the one we lost down in Massachusetts. It seems nobody keeps things in stock anymore: I must have talked to a dozen places that all said "Oh yes, no trouble, we can have a prop for you in 5 to 6 weeks!" Fortunately, the Flex-o-fold folks have stock and could ship the same day...UPS did its magic and I had the prop in my hands Wednesday. Then I took a couple of hours and drove it up to a machine shop that was able to make a new shaft and yesterday we had the great event: Our diver and our mechanic converged on the boat and swapped in the new shaft.

Now, the prop shaft is connected to the engine, which is inside the boat, and to the propeller, which is outside of the boat. As you can imagine, this means the shaft has to pass through the boats hull in some way that doesn't let water into the boat....no mean feat when the shaft has to be able to turn at 1500 revolutions per minute and the place where it has to go through the hull is far below the water surface so the water pressure trying to get in is quite large. Generally, the hole in the hull is quite large (an inch and a half in our case) and some sort of seal prevent water from coming in around the shaft. But, if you pull out the shaft, water gushes in at a rather amazing rate (Which is why the moment we realized we might have lost our prop, the first thing we did was look in our bilges and engine compartment to make sure we weren't taking on water)! So the challenge was to remove the old shaft, insert the new shaft, and get everything aligned and the new prop attached without sinking the boat...

The key was to have have figured out all the problems before starting. That's why I took the prop to the machine shop: even though the tapering and threading on the end of a prop shaft is standardized, we wanted to actually put the prop on the shaft so there would be no surprise. Of course, having a professional commercial diver with 30 years of experience and a mechanic who has specialized in small boat inboards goes a very long way towards eliminating surprises, too. Nevertheless, I had every pump on board (all six of them!) primed and ready to go just in case. As the saying goes: You're not sinking as long as you're pumping faster than its coming in!

With all our preparations, pleasantly enough, everything went well. The engine was lifted up off of it's mounts so the old shaft could be pulled out underneath it, the diver stuffed rags in the hole which kept the water flow to a trickle while the coupling and seal was transferred to the new shaft, the new shaft was slide into place and everything was bolted back down. The diver made short work of assembling our fairly complex folding prop underwater and, in about two hours, we could motor forward and backwards again! All it took was a week of logistics, and half a month's salary....

So now that we can move again, what are we going to do? Stay here! Evelyn has a dental follow-up in Halifax on Tuesday. We had originally thought we'd be far away by then and we'd have to put her on a bus or something but, now its so close that it makes the most sense to just stay here a few more days and drive her up there in our rental car and then make our passage to Maine when the weather says we can after Tuesday...but at least now its our choice!