It's March 24 and it's finally warm enough to get back to work on our list of boat projects. The snow is gone, even though we had the third "nor'easter" storm earlier this week. Nor'easter is now a TV weatherman term meant to keep us glued to our TVs. That works, of course, even though the last storm didn't leave enough snow here in Hartford to shovel.
Okay, back to boating. We arrived at the boatyard with two things on our list: Replace the hydraulic lines on the trim tab pump (one of which was leaking) and install our newly rebuild starter on the starboard engine.
The trim tab part went well enough. We trimmed the hydraulic hoses back and installed new fittings. Those fittings turned out to be hard to find. The local shops had nothing. Boat US had lots and we ordered four. After three weeks, Boat US couldn't figure out where those fittings were. So we ordered four more from iboat, which is located is one of the nation's boating capitals, Utah. I had our hydraulic fittings in hand in six days. So much for Boat US.
The new fittings were installed on the trim tab pump lines in minutes but to see if the pump now actually worked, we had to add automatic transmission fluid up to the "full" line on the pump. The full hole in the pump is really small, smaller than anything we had on board, so we'll have to hunt up some really, really small tubing to fill the pump and then test it.
Then came the starter. It was on the starboard engine and it worked okay but not anywhere near as fast as the port starter, which had been rebuilt three years ago by our favorite auto/electric guy in Middletown, Connecticut. It took our guy two months (they knew were were boaters in winter storage) but now, the 30 lb. original Chrysler starter was ready to re-install.
After a lot of surveying the installation area, we managed to get the starter in position and when we finally had it seated, bolted the damn thing down and reconnected the power cable.
Once that was done, we straightened up the cabin and dragged our bags back to the car. But, the weather was so nice, we decided to check out the dock and the boats in storage. Looking at boats is one of our favorite activities and we burned up a few minutes doing just that before we left.
The video is below. We'll be cleaning up our old and somewhat dirty bilge soon.
