November 14-30, 2004 -- Life on the Dock Continues

Sunday, November 14 was a pretty quiet day. Monday, November 15 was my (Bryan) birthday. On Tuesday, November 16, the oil cooler arrived! We picked it up and called the mechanic. He will come out tomorrow to install it. On Wednesday, November 17, the mechanic installed the new oil cooler. The generator is now running! We flushed the cooling system to remove as much of the oil as we could. Now, we need to burn off the oil used in assembling the new pistons. So, on Thursday, November 18, we ran the generator for several hours to burn off the oil used in assembling the new pistons. On Friday, November 19, we checked the generator for the smoking issue. It is still smoking on start up, indicating that it is burning oil. We called the mechanic, and he said that he would come back out on Monday. We spent a quiet weekend. It has been raining, pretty much straight since Liz and Sarge left, so we haven't been able to laundry. On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the sun came back out and we took advantage of that to do laundry. On Wednesday, November 24, we put the dinghy up on deck to investigate and repair the intermittent light problem. We have tried this several times, and never been able to identify the problem. With all of the rain the light problem has gotten significantly worse. So, we worked in between the rain. After running through a series of tests, we came to the conclusion that the positive wire had gone bad. We replaced the wire, and everything is working again! Between November 25 and November 30, we put the boat back together. In order to do the work on the generator, we had to remove the dining table so we could lift the soft patch. So, we reassembled everything. This actually took quite some time! On November 30, we pulled off the dock. The thing about Varadaro Marina is that we can only enter and exit there at near high tide. So, we left the dock 3 hours before high tide and headed toward the "deep channel". It took three tries, but we finally made it! It is so nice to be back at anchor again