MV, huh? We were just up there late Aug/Early Sept. La Gringa's family has a summer home there, in Edgartown. I lived on Cape Cod off and on for TOO many years, both my sons live in Falmouth. Must be getting kinda chilly this time of the year.
gringo
I live in Edg, Ocean Heights.
Yep you got it right, it is getting pretty crappy here. Early winter for us, most of the ice has melted from last storms. Not as bad as Boston area second highest year of snow fall for Dec. Many barns and buildings having their roof cave in.
Very pleasant looking and reading your narative.
Hopefully it will be a record breaking thread.
Thanks again.
I remember one outfit that ran the cold effluent water thru metal pipes about 10inches off the ground. With the heat and humidity in Kona the metal pipes with 40degree seawater running through them really dripped the condensation. They planted strawberries under all those pipes...they got huge because of the water and tasted like they were made of spun sugar with all the Kona sunshine!
No, no memories whatsoever....
All I have to say is welcome a board Gringo and thanks for this thread and
the great photos please keepem coming, and that is a very cool Dog I love the
pic of him on the bow of the center console looking into the water great shot
Hey guys, this is really great. When I first started thinking about picking up this whole journal thing on another forum, I had doubts. I wasn't sure it would be as well received somewhere else as it had been where it was. Its really great that people here like the photos. We take the pictures anyway. For the first two years we were here, I would take them, download them, look at them, and forget them. Unless I emailed one to the family or something.
Actually, I don't take the photos. They take themselves. All I do is try to hold the camera steady and push the right buttons. I am so glad you enjoy them. Heres some about changing gear oil down here when your trailer is several islands away.
One day on Pine Cay I was talking to my friends Preacher and Raymond. I was telling them I was overdue to get the gear oil changed in the outboard. I was pondering whether I should wait til I could haul the boat over at the boatyard. We were going to leave it on the trailer while we made a trip up to the USA . Preacher grinned at me, and said "Hey mon. You are turning into an island man and we don't pay nobody at some boatyard when we need to work on our motors.." Then of course I heard more about life in the islands before boatyards, travel-lifts, fiberglass boats, etc. Preacher remembers when he saw his first outboard motor, back in the late 60's. Before that, it was just sail here. The advent of technicans who fix boats is still pretty fresh, these guys do all their own boat work. They like to kid me about my hi-tech approach to things. Yeah, but who taught several of them how GPS works, huh? Yeh. so there.
But I do love to hear their stories, and I learn so much from them. And they love to tell stories. They appreciate a good listener. Maybe I am more like an island mon than I realized.
So how do you turn down a friendly challenge like that? Change my own oil, instead of being a rich white guy who hires a boatyard to do it....Especially when its wrapped in a slight compliment about me being a white guy turning into an island mon... So, I decided to change my own gear oil without hauling the boat out. Of course by this time Preacher and Raymond were gone. Not going to get any help from them. Shouldn't be any great shakes. I backed the boat up to the beach at high tide, and shoved a piece of PVC pipe under the hull. Threw the anchor on the beach ran some lines abeam to keep her from swinging in the current, and waited for the tide to fall.
La Gringa and I snapped some photos ( of course) and realizet its probably pretty boring to everyone but the white guy with the new boat who wants to be an island mon...Heck, for all I know everybody changes their gear oil like this.
Here's what it looked like at high tide . My thinking was that as the tide tide ran out and the water level fell, the bow of the boat should move downwards and the pvc pipe under the hull will act as a fulcrum, thus lifting the transom a little...at least, that's the plan. (Heck, I never did it this way before)
and then I went and farted around with a dozen other little projects for six hours, and then Voila! as them franchmans say. Sure as heck, the bow dropped with the tide and the beach appeared under the motor, and the PVC acted like a fulcrum. Just as though I knew what I was doing.
I was glad to see it did what I thought it would do, pivoting on the PVC, and actually raising the stern several inches off the beach. (I think its a good thing when boats do what you think they will do when you do whatever it is that you do to the boat when you do it.)
I needed to dig a hole ( I thought at the time) so that I could put the motor vertical, but its way easy in soft sand. (Heck, I like to play in the sand, anyhow. Sometimes when nobody's looking, I still make little dams and forts and stuff on the beach,and cut canals and moats and let the waves knock them down, and...strike that. Forget I said that.)
Then I found some broken down old gringo who ain't afraid of getting dirty, drained out the old lube, pumped in the new lube, and 'Bob's yer uncle' as them Brits sometimes say. (Some of them actually do say that, you know. I've heard it. I even know what it means, now.)
did you notice the "Tide" jug I used to drain it into? That's literally appropriate, or poetic justice, or it might even be iambic pentameter for all I know... yeah, like I planned it that way. haha. I figured out later that I didn't need to get the engine vertical. The drain plug needs to be at the lowest point, and thats not vertical. Its tilted. so NEXT time, it will be even less work than this. And this was pretty easy.
Now I just had to wait til the tide started rising again and floated her off back to the dock. No biggie. Good for another hundred hours. That's the plan,anyhow...
and it worked. And I learned a couple things for next time. First, I dont need as deep a hole. And second, I don't need to wait til high tide. Actually, about mid way on the ebb tide would be better. Then you dont have to wait as long for the tide to turn around and come back in. You don't need that much time to do it. So it would have shortened the wait time to maybe say, three hours.
At first, I thought "wow, that was simple. Too bad it took all those hours to do it, waiting on the tide to turn..." but then I realized something. If I had taken it to the boatyard and told them to change the gear oil, would I have gotten it back the same day? No friggen way. There would have been the day I took it in. The day they hauled it out and changed the oil, and then I would have picked it up the next day. At $ 40 an hour plus hauling and launching fees. I did it for the price of the lube. 30 min work. Max. and now I know I can do it anywhere.
Maybe these island mons know a thing or two bout boats, I think.
I helped a friend in Costa Rica swap out a motor in much the same fashion. We took the motor at low tide and then waited till the next day and installed the new at low tide the next day. We were standing in waist deep water making all the final connections though!!
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