It’s now Thursday evening and we still don’t have the van back. Turns out that the bushings in the lower suspension arms won’t come out – too corroded – so they had to be sent off to a local machine shop to get the oxy-acetylene blowtorch on them. They should come back from the workshop tomorrow, and then the van gets reassembled and sent off for wheel alignment. We’re now running 4 days behind plan which sucks a bit – it’s eating into time we’d rather spend exploring.
But, we are getting a load of jobs done. I’ve fixed the roller furling drum; the bottom half was rotating which meant that furling / unfurling was risky. Don’t want to get a jam up there. I fitted a bright LED spotlight to the shelf above the table (at last!) so that we have a light in front of us (rather than behind our heads) for drawing and computer work.
I changed the engine oil and filter today – that was a bit more of an effort than I expected, but no major hurdles. Since the engine is low in the boat (as with all boats) you can’t get a tank in underneath and just drain it like you can with a car, so you have to pump the oil out manually. The pump I bought ages ago does the job, but it takes ages. At least it works.
I’ve also replaced the pump that drains the inside shower tray; the original couldn’t prime itself if it was just air in the pipes. There’s a local “consignment” store just around the corner which sells a load of second hand boat parts, which is pretty handy. All our electric pumps aboard are now ShurFlo, which means they have the same attachments and should be interchangeable if we need to switch one out for another.
We’ve been sorting through lockers, clearing up and tidying up, making a fair bit more space for filling with things like food. Rose has been fixing the windlass power cables to the top of the lockers so it doesn’t waggle around and chafe, contorting herself into crazy angles to get at screws in the back of small spaces.
Hopefully we’ll be on the road tomorrow … before the Friday traffic … Rose overheard some kids in a mall the other day saying that it’s only a couple of days till their summer vacation, I’m hoping that we don’t get caught in holiday traffic heading north.
Road and Ocean 