A Tale of Two Chemists: Dinghy and Outboard Repairs …. and Packing, Packing, Packing!

Dinghy and Outboard Repairs …. and Packing, Packing, Packing!

Wed 29^th – Friday 31^st July 2020

On Sunday evening we brought our inflatable dinghy and Honda outboard motor home from East Greenwich. We had problems with the outboard at the end of last season and had put it in for repair / service over the winter, but the shop weren’t able to reproduce the problem and weren’t confident they had fixed. They were correct, they hadn’t fixed it and it was running very poorly as we tried to shuttle to and from the dock last week. On Monday morning we phoned around but every service center that we called had a 3- week waiting list. We had a new spare carburetor (that Gloria had brought down to Tortola in 2017 when we were also having some issues but resolved without using the spare), so we took the bold step to switch out the carburetor ourselves. This went surprisingly well and on completion the engine started up first time … except now there was no cooling water coming out of the “pisser”. This had to be a separate issue and on dismantling the lower part of the engine we found that the water pump impeller was totally shot. In retrospect we are sure that this happened on the final use last year when we saw smoke from that area and the engine overheated. We think it was pure chance that we got some cooling water flow last week and we were really lucky that the problem revealed itself whilst we were working on the motor this week. We ordered the new parts and on Thursday reassembled everything. Again the engine started up fine, only this time the propeller was constantly in gear send water spraying everywhere and actually quite dangerous. It turned out that whilst troubleshooting the problems we had taken out the propeller shaft and inadvertently dropped a critical stainless steel shifting rod into the gear casing. We know this because we fished around in the gear case oil and found it! Anyway, third time is a charm and we got it all back together and it now seems to be running beautifully. We also took the opportunity to find the leak in the inflatable floor of our dinghy and were able to patch that. So now we should be in great shape for running around in the dinghy.

Other than that we have been busy finishing up the packing and storage of stuff that we are leaving in the house. I think we might have said this after moving out in 2012 but never again!

On a final note, hurricane Isaias has just formed off the coast Hispaniola and is heading north. We will move aboard tomorrow (Saturday) and on Tuesday we may get tropical storm conditions in New England!

Mike and Gloria

41.6547, -71.4485