Michigan: St Ignace (Day 4)

Day: 51
(No travel progress)

With our replacement exhaust elbow scheduled to be delivered at 11:00, we slept in until 9:00, ate breakfast around 10:00, and before we could go check in with the marina office to see about the delivery, someone was knocking on our boat with the box in hand.  Clark dove into that box like a child at Christmas.  The only problem was that it had so much strapping tape on it, it was harder to break into than Fort Knox.  He hacked at the box with a putty knife as I asked if he would prefer something designed to open boxes, i.e. a box cutter.  He said yes but continued to hack away at the tape.  I verified that he wanted me to get the box cutter because I didn't want to come back with one and find I had wasted my time digging it out of my storage chest.

Besides being very expensive, repairs on boats are always a PITA, and today's job was no exception. Two metal gaskets came with the replacement elbow.  Clark had a devil of a time getting one of them to lie flat against the metal of the elbow.  He worked away at it for what felt like forever, and when I looked at my watch, I was surprised to see it was 3:00 already.  He took a break long enough to eat lunch and went back to it.

Finally he was ready to "smoke test" the fix quite literally.  He had me start the engine, and as soon as it started I could smell heavy exhaust fumes in the cabin.  He spread a soapy mix over the connections on both ends of the elbow, and he got lots of bubbles meaning both were leaking air (and fumes).  We killed the engine while we decided the next course of action.  Clark could find nothing in the engine manual indicating that a bonding material / adhesive should be used on the gasket to help seal it.

He looked on the internet for suggestions, and finally he called Lockwoods Boat Works where he had purchased the parts to ask their advice.  The engine mechanic there relayed how he handled this type of repair (actually with a hammer), and Clark followed his recommended procedures.  The next time we started up the engine no fumes could be smelled (at least not by me).  Clark decided that we needed a test drive, so we took the boat out for a run to bring the engine up to temp to see what happened.  I drove while Clark investigated down below.

He came back with a report that he could not smell exhaust fumes, but he could smell burning Wisk. Great! Maybe?  We brought the boat back into port and declared success on the repair.  Now what to do with the burning soap?!  The engine temperature, and therefore the elbow as well, reaching up around 1000 degrees.  After we got ourselves settled and the engine had cooled, Clark washed the Wisk off the elbow connections to remove the soapy residue and hopefully curtail any smoking from that when we leave port to head to our next destination.

As insurance Clark had gone out around 4:00 to the NAPA auto store to buy a high-temp sealant in case the hammer solution did not work for us.  When he came back from that quick trip, he reported that a farmer's market was set up in the marina parking lot.  I can't resist farmer's markets, so I headed over to see what I could find.  The market consisted of several small booths selling vegetables, jewelry, and jams.  I found some zucchini that I couldn't pass up as well as some other freshly picked veggies.

I did not buy any of the wire-wrapped-stone fobs for sale as I looked at them and decided that if I wanted something similar I would tap my sister on the shoulder as she has become quite expert at various types of jewelry making including wrapped stones.  The venders prices were all over the place ranging from $10 to $50 for a fob with no apparent rhyme nor reason to the pricing.  Sadly for her, the more she told me about her business, the less I wanted to purchase anything.  Basically she talked herself out of a potential sale by talking too much.

By the time we were done with all of today's chores. (I forgot to mention that while Clark worked on the engine all that time, I baked him his favorite Applesauce Cake dessert.  I made two loaves of it in my two-slice toaster oven.  Due to size constraints, I had to cook them serially, so I had the toaster oven running for an hour and a half while they baked.)  Anyway, what with the repair, the cooking, the shopping, and the test run on the boat, 6:30 rolled around in a hurry.

The marina has a free concert on Thursday nights at 7:00, and of course, Clark and I wanted to attend. Based on that plan, I had 30 minutes in which to cook dinner and eat if we wanted to get there when it started.   We made it there for 7:15, so not too bad.  We left the dinner dishes for cleanup upon our return to the boat after the show.

As we walked from the boat to the show, Clark took a picture of a now happy Sea Moss sitting at the dock with a Lake Huron lighthouse in the background.

Happy Sea Moss

The performers tonight Gemini played children's folk music from the U.S. and around the world. They played multiple instruments and sang their songs in multiple languages with very pleasant-to-listen-to voices.  My favorite instruments are the fiddle and the banjo.  I didn't see a banjo, but the fiddle playing was great.

Gemini Performing at the Marina

Although the show ended at 8:30, by 8:00 the stands had thinned considerably as the weather got too cold for comfort as the sun got lower and lower.  Just before 8:00 I took a brisk walk back to the boat and changed into warmer clothes; otherwise, I would not have been able to see the show to conclusion.  Temperatures here this week have been in the 50s.  When the sun is out, that 50-something feels like 70-something, but in the shade or in the evening / night, that 50 feels like 50. Clark noted that the dress uniform around here is shorts on the bottom and layers on top. It works!

After the show, we walked back to the boat and Clark captured the reflection of the sunset in the sliding door of the boat, so we have a mirror-image sunset picture.  So cool !!!

Sunset Reflected on Sliding Door on Boat

Tomorrow we plan to set off from here to continue our journey.  As I mentioned in a prior entry, if I had to get stuck somewhere, this was the place for it to happen.  Besides the repair, we packed in a lot of sightseeing and completion of miscellaneous chores plus got in some extra zzzzzzs a couple of mornings as well.  The real plus here though is the lack of mosquitoes and big, juicy spiders that haunted us in Canada.

Our estimated trip tomorrow is 4.5 hours long, so we'll need to get up and get going early once again as we had been doing before this layover.  I find it is so easy to fall back into being "lazy".  Other than hiking to the washroom several times a day, I got almost no exercise yesterday or today.  It's hard to get myself back into the mindset of wanting to be constantly on the go again, but with this unexpected layover, we must press onwards.