Sailboat World Problems
Waaah! Waaah! Waaah! Tears of frustration are abounding in our household right now. Even our dog is over just sitting on the boat (- if he can even find a place ) & watching "us" (-mostly Matt) fixing the same thing for hours & hours.
Getting ready to get things done!
Matt's pulley contraption to lift the 450 lb. motor.
In our last episode, we were stoked on the beautiful replacement of the U-bolt & deck plate for our port-side, aft shroud! However, when we went back this weekend, Matt decided to reattach that shroud to the U-bolt & found he could barely fit it on there. So here is a project that needs to be redone. Don't cue the sad violin music yet though.
Motor ready for take-off!
Old & New motor mounts.
Rusted old mount out.
In with the shiny new mount!
Matt preparing to blow torch the mount out!
Ta da! Finally!
We got super excited for getting the motor mounts off - especially the pesky one that decided to stick to the engine. Then we got excited for getting the new motor mounts placed & getting the motor on top of all four of them! Only to find.... we couldn't align the engine up with the propeller shaft!!!!
Getting the engine onto the new motor mounts!
Almost done.....
After trying & trying to line up the engine with the propeller shaft Matt found that no matter what he did, it was just impossible to get them lined up with less than a 3,000th of an inch amount of space in between them. (Yes, it has to be THAT exact!) Now you can play the dramatic violin music.
Just when he thought he was done....
He does have a good idea of what he can do to fix the situation but we were just discouraged to not be making more progress on getting the boat back into ship-shape. I seriously thought he was going to want to sink the boat after this. I give credit to him for not giving up. Patience is running low because we want to be reminded of why we bought this boat & have put so much money into it. -In other words, we want to sail!
Gratuitous Zephyr photo from the sailing days.
Of course we do realize that there are so many worse things going on in the world today & are so lucky if this is our biggest problem right now. Even in the boat world, at least our boat still floats & can probably still sail. It's proper that we named our boat, MerSea. Times like these make us realize what to be thankful for.
Merci MerSea
So with this attitude & a few days break from infinite boat projects, we can definitely persevere. I'm not going to go into what steps Matt is going to take to fix this problem. I think it's better to relay this after the problem has been fixed.
Wish us luck & wisdom & more patience!
Thanks for reading!
