Finally, a nice weekend

Hard to believe that it was snowing two weeks ago, but this is southern New England. The weather changes fast at this time of year.

With a temperature in the low 70s, many of the boaters showed up to begin recommissioning for the summer season. At Portland Riverside (and a lot of other boatyards, we'd guess), "recommissioning" means standing around with old friends and talking about last summer, or their grand kids or how difficult it is to change one of their sails.

Not us. We went right to work. Okay, we did stop and chat with Rob, the guy who owns the boat next to us.

The first order of business was to replace the sea water pump on the port engine. We'd already changed that pump on the starboard engine and since we have no idea about how long these pumps have been in service, it made sense to change both of them. It helps that we found two new pumps on the boat when we bought it.

If you are reading this blog and have a Chrysler 360 marine engine, this is the seawater pump you have.

This a  Sherwood G7B pump. It's all bronze and there are rebuild kits available for it. New ones cost just north of $300. For these engines, Chrysler Marine made a bracket for it that bolts to the block and the front of the circulating pump.

Here's what it looks like before we installed the upper hose.

Getting this pump on is at least a 30-minute job, at least for us. If you are mounting this pump on a Chrysler LM-318 or LM-360, it goes much faster if you remove the upper hose and then the mounting bracket with the pump still attached.

We're going to rebuild the two old pumps (if we can get them apart) and keep them for spares.

Our final job for Saturday was to replace the forward starboard deck hinge. Isn't anything easy on a boat? Turning out old stop nuts while reaching around behind the engine hatch to hold the bolt in place was a new kind of exercise. Eventually we quit and went home with just one old nut refusing to come off.

On Sunday, we split that one last nut with a hacksaw blade and then got into this awkward position and mounted the deck hinge. Took us almost an hour and it would have gone faster if we had longer arms. A lot longer.

Finally, the new hinge is in place. Now we'll have to paint the hatch covers to cover the marks left by the old ones

We got some other things done on Sunday before we headed up to the airport to pick up Frances who was returning from two weeks in Florida visiting her family. Good the have her back!