Saturday, August 5, 2017
Mary and I loaded up our pickup truck yesterday and drove to
Birmingham where we spent the night in a motel in order to visit with Pam
Parsons the daughter of my great and good but sadly deceased friends Hank and
Ruth and Stanford Skinner. This morning
we once again braved the craziness known as interstate highway diving. I must say that I would feel ever so much
safer aboard a boat dodging monster tows in a lightning storm at night on a
narrow river! Those people out there on
the crowded interstates are trying to kill you!
We arrived here in Green Turtle Bay Marina in grand Rivers at 1600
today to find the Pathfinder under a covered slip WAY around the marina cover
such that one is required to depart the main business area of the marina, and backtrack
through Grand Rivers and out the south side of town to circle around to pier 12. The pier and marina office/business area are
within sight of each other about several hundred yards apart, but the trip
between then by road is several miles long.
Once we got parked, we discovered that we were about fifty feet above
the water level on the side of a hill.
It took us both three trips back and forth between the truck and the
boat with two capacious dock carts to load all the stuff from the truck onto
the boat.
After a dinner at the marina Yacht club, yes several miles around
Robin Hood’s barn, we returned t the boat where I finished up installing the
overhauled alternator with new vee-belt about 10:30 PM. Tomorrow I will attack the task of removing
the old injectors from the Onan generator and installed the overhauled pair I brought
with us. Then a sea trial will be in
order to assure all Is well with the alternator and the charging system.
At some point after the engine room fun, I will be installing the
new AIS transponder and AIS-capable VHF radio the owner had me order for
him. I check them out at home to ensure
I had all the NMEA 2000 network parts to connect the AIS to the two Garmin
chart plotters. I think it will be slick
system and not too tough to install.
With our own vehicle and no more two-hour limit as imposed by the
marina for their courtesy van, Mary is FREE and expects to make at least one
trip to Paducah, about 30 miles away to see the National Quilt Museum and to
visit a quilt store. She is trying to
entice me to go along by telling me about a Civil War museum and other things
that may be of interest to me, but I am thinking the boat work will take priority.
