It’s not all fun and games. We’ve just spent three long, hot, sweaty days with heads in the engine, battery compartment, or bilge. No more sunshine and margaritas – just tools, hoses, wires, parts, clamps, connections, coolant, and a fair amount of cussing.

I am constantly amazed by my husband’s (inate?) knowledge of how to install, maintain, and fix these things that seem very complex and sometimes totally foreign to me. But, trust me, I know wayyyy more about this kind of stuff than I did five months ago.

We traced the engine’s entire cooling system to try to figure out why she’s been running hot. This involved cleaning the intake, checking the elbows, draining all the coolant from heat exchanger, soaking the column in acid, checking the raw water impellor, replacing the thermostat, and replacing and tensioning the v-belt. I actually know what these things are now!  Yes, she did run cooler after 10 hours of labour. But then we noticed a drip…. and we might have a failed seal in the raw water pump (too depressed to write about it now as we are trying to head north tomorrow and this would put a massive wrench in our plans).

Second big project was finishing the Echo-Tec watermaker installation – the electrical side of things.  Up to this point the installation has been straightforward but electrical is one area that we didn’t want to fool with (doing the wiring for small fans is one thing, but the watermaker has a 30amp motor with a long run to the battery compartment) . We were very fortunate to have Will and Marilyn from S/V Shaman One offer some assistance. Will was able to show my Will how to do the wiring properly and in about a fifth of the time it would’ve taken us to figure it out on our own. Very big thanks to him!

And she works like a charm. This means showers everyday!

Tool explosion. Will and Will with their heads in the battery compartment.

Not a fun day

I always take pictures to make sure we re-connect things properly