October 21, 2008.

The ceramic heater turned out to be a timely purchase. The outside temps dropped to 43 degrees last night but the interior of the boat hovered just above 60 so it wasn’t too bad.

This morning I spent some time cleaning the newly exposed recesses of the bilge. Shortly thereafter Ken stopped in to say that they had been able to round up a coupling that would fit our application. It should be here just after lunch tomorrow. So there’s an outside chance they’ll be on the boat tomorrow afternoon to reinstall the transmission.

So much for outside chances. Dawn broke today revealing another crisp morning complete with an early fog upon the water. It’s now Wednesday and Kens been given some other duties to perform at the marina this afternoon. So we have another day to sit and wait, but he did tell us that he installed the seal in the pump and the correct coupling did arrive. So we’ll be expecting him first thing in the morning to put the transmission back into place.

After that it’ll be up to Christy and me to put the myriad of hoses, wires and whatchmacallits back where they belong before we even start reinstalling the generator. There’s an outside chance that we’ll be ready by tomorrow evening but after all this time we’re not really willing to chance rushing through just to get done. So a Friday departure may be possible but I think Saturday morning might be more realistic.

So we decided do a little walking around to pick up a few odds and ends that we’ve needed. Another interesting thing we came across when we got to the more rural parts of the country were the motor vehicles. A guy at the local service station drives this customized pick up
truck while one of the marina workers has a hot rodded Yugo out in the lot. I can’t even remember the last Yugo I saw on the road let alone one with a 4 inch exhaust.