October 17, 2008.

Today dawned with us tied to the wall at the Atlantic Yacht Basin marina. The service manager came down and confirmed that it is indeed a transmission seal. I’m kinda pissed because we just had them replaced a year ago.

The marina doesn’t have any mechanics free today but we will be scheduled to have a guy on Monday. Most of the incurred cost is going to be labor in a thing like this. There’s just so much crap in the way. We’ll do all of the preliminary disassembly ourselves in an effort to save some time and money.

The biggest part of the job was removing the generator. The generator lives directly over the transmission and definitely had to come out. I disconnected everything while Christy labeled it all so we would be able to reinstall it later with as few headaches as possible. She even took a slew of pictures in case there was any question later as to where things went.

Once we had everything ready I laid out a thick piece of cardboard to set the generator on before shoving it out of the way and into the salon. The most difficult part of the process was the need to lift the generator about a foot off the ground and over a small partition and onto the cardboard. The first time I tried to pick it up I had to recheck to make sure that it wasn’t still bolted to the floor. Holy shit! It barely moved.

While I was lamenting the fact that I must be getting old, we decided to rig our boom vang as a block and tackle to do the lifting. Christy went topside and dropped the end of the vang down the companionway so I could attach it to the generators lifting ring. With her doing the raising I was able to force the generator over the wall and onto the cardboard. Once out of the way the transmission seems almost accessible.


I’ll wait until Sunday afternoon before I get the rest of the crap out of the way. Some of it is our fresh water system so it makes sense to do it at the last possible moment.

When we were all done and cleaned up I went to the generators manual to check and see how much the little bitch actually weighs. It turns out that it weighs 277 pounds! No wonder it felt like it was still bolted down.