Ahhhh Success -- Engine Drive train repaired!!

Whoa -- the wind has really piped up today. Actually it blew strong all night and I was a bit anxious and all seeing how I had no reverse gear in my boat in case we needed to do an emergency re-anchor.

Well it worked out just fine. Just like 99.995% of the time where these fears are really just that -- fears.

We had an enjoyable night playing dominoes over at Born to Cruise with Jill and Wayne and the crew from Whisper -- Pattie and Ray. Very enjoyable evening.

Today I did little this morning. With the wind blowing 20+ on my little Delta Anchor - which has never failed yet - I was uncomfortable working on the shaft coupler incase we needed to more abruptly. After lunch with no abatement in the wind and everything holding fine I went ahead and disassembled the coupler to see if possibly I could "finesse" it back into position rather than using my perceived brute force method of just driving the boat HARD until it reseated. I had little hope since last summer I had to drive the shaft into the coupler from the outside using a 3lb Ball Peen hammer.

Well I disassembled it and cleaned the shaft and hub with solvent. Then using a fine sand paper I polished the shaft and inside hub. I found a slight burr on the edge of the prop shaft so I removed it with light filing. Then I greased all surfaces using that white lithium grease with Teflon and tried to reassemble. It would only go on about ½ inch by hand. Then I found that if I took a 16" wonder bar and lightly tapped the face of the hub it slowly moved on the shaft. Surprisingly using only light taps I was able to get it all the way into position for the setscrews - ALL RIGHT!!

To avoid this problem in the future I got Wayne to come and advise me in how to safety wire the setscrews. Ohh I had done that wrong originally.. He showed me how to do it and with the help of some loctite on the threads this problem should not recur. I hope so.

After a celebratory beer or two it was back to reading for the afternoon. It is just too windy to leave the boat this afternoon. Fortunately moderation of wind is predicted for tonight and it will be downright nice tomorrow. Unfortunately listening to the VHF there is a whole pass ale of boats waiting to cross the Whale and come up here and GTC to wait for the next weather window to head back to the US.

There is a small window today through Friday but it is not ideal with a 7 foot swell and 3 foot wind chop so we will wait a little longer. That and I want to test my fix to the prop shaft a bit first before heading out across the Atlantic.

Even though it is windy - we plan another night of games with the crew of Born to Cruise, and Celtic Cross hopes to be here tomorrow night for even more games.. Yahoo -- I fell better now that my prop shaft coupling has been repaired!!