Strike One

Ron arrived around 7:30 Wednesday evening after visiting his physical therapist for his rotator cuff problems. My younger son, Gordon, came along this time. Charlie had learned his lesson. Ron towed the boat up to Hidden Cove Marina, about 2 miles from my house. There was no one in their offices so we asked a guy who was there washing his boat if he could unlock the gate for us so we could use their ramp. Ron backed the boat into the water and showed me how to lower the drive unit and then moved the truck and trailer outside the fence so he could give the guy back his keys. Ron came back and said, "Turn the key, just like starting a car." I did, but it wasn't like starting a car at all: nothing happened.

Ron checked some stuff and said the battery was good but it wasn't supplying power to the starter. He said there might be a kill switch somewhere to make it harder to steal the boat. We searched around and couldn't find anything. Ron went back to his truck and retrieved some tools. We opened the motor cover and he jumpered the starter contacts with a screwdriver. It turned over but didn't start. He said if there's a kill switch it still won't start because the ignition system will be turned off. We looked around some more and again found nothing.

Ron did some more jumpering and fiddling with the carburetor and got it to fire. Several cycles of start-sputter-quit-fiddle-jump later he got it to idle. Anything faster than idling was too much for it, though. It had been sitting too long and the carburetor had too much buildup of stale gasoline sludge in it to carburet properly and would need to be rebuilt. Ron looked toward the bow. (See how nautical I'm sounding already?) It was the instrument panel that he was looking at: "It's overheating."

He said the impeller that sucks up river water and pumps it into the engine to cool it is probably bad. It's a common problem. Ron said I had three options. I could leave the boat at the marina and get them to fix it, Ron could take it to his shop and fix it, or he could take it back to my house and I could fix it and save myself $6-700 in labor charges. I thought of a few other options like abandoning it or shoving it in front of a barge, but chose number three.

Laura talked to Dottie the following morning and told her about the various problems. She was afraid that I'd be really angry. I wasn't. I was angry before, when she wouldn't accept that maybe this boat wasn't exactly the bargain of the century, but there was no point in being mad now. Done is done and I personally only had a little under four hundred dollars invested so far in my free but inoperative boat.

I had to put the boat repairs on the back burner for a while because I was in the midst of another project. I have this Nissan pickup truck that I bought new in 1986 and that Charlie wrecked in November of 2000. I had been tossing fixing it versus junking it back and forth and eventually, after getting settled into the new house, I decided to start repairing it. About a third of what I had to do was collision repair. The rest was repairing many years accumulation of rust and getting the engine to run properly after sitting unused for so long. By late July/early August I had the truck back on the road and was ready to tackle the boat.

Next: Initial Repairs

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