August 1. Things aren’t going quite as well as we had envisioned. Once the bronze propeller shaft had been removed it became obvious that the shaft was scrap. There were deep grooves worn into the shaft where the packing had ridden on it in the past. Somebody had changed the shaft log and to hide the grooves they had cut the log an extra inch long. This means that the damaged part of the shaft was hidden inside the shaft log where no one could see it. It would probably be fine but as long as we’re this far into it we might as well fix everything we find that’s not right.

This means that there’s a new propeller shaft in our immediate future. On Wednesday morning the old shaft was sent to the local machine shop to be copied. We should have our new stainless version back on Friday. If that happens then we should be back in the water on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately they don’t work here on Saturdays so the rest of the reassembly won’t begin until Monday.

On the bright side tho is the fact that this yard is part of a network of yards so our transmission and V-drive have been sent over to another yard that has a full time guy that just deals with transmissions. So we're still hanging in the travel lift slings until we get the new shaft.




Well that was last night. First thing this morning Dave comes walking over with our brand new prop shaft. The old shaft was dropped off at the machine shop Wednesday morning before lunch and we had the new shaft installed in the boat by 1000 on Thursday. Great service, super quick turnaround.

The prop is back on and we are put back in the water and towed over to our previous berth. The transmission should be back in the morning and the generator is already to go. So there is an outside chance that we could be ready to go by the end of the day tomorrow. We have to remember that even tho the glass is half full it’s not a magical chalice. It all depends on what time the transmission gets here, there’s still a lot of work to do. The transmission and V-drive have to be reinstalled before the generator can be put back into place.

At night after the workmen have left for the day we’ve been using the opportunity to do some work on the boat. First thing we did after the generator and drive train were removed was to clean the bilge. Our bilge is 3 feet deep and was truly a dark scary place. You couldn’t even see the bottom let alone touch it. It’s spotless now…..alright, alright, it is pretty clean though. No, really.

Tonight I moved the generators small fuel filter and electric fuel pump. In its original position you couldn’t change the filter without unbolting the generator from the deck and sliding it aside to provide only marginal access. I had never even seen the tiny electric fuel pump before all this disassembly so I moved that as well since I had the opportunity.

Tomorrow should be interesting……..