April 16, 2008

After the celebration; The party slowly wound down over the last 2 days, and we moved on to other activities. Having established that Windswept was back on her mooring in Majuro, and Richard & Chris had joined Jerry for dinner ashore the next night, we could focus on our last few days in Aur before returning to our "city" life. One of the favorite pastimes of yachties is repairing equipment for the locals and teaching them how to maintain their high tech toys and tools. Spike has established a brisk trade in outboard motor repair at this atoll, and has quite a high success rate. Only 3 of them had him baffled, so he took me along to try my luck. The first was a Yamaha that had stopped shifting and was locked in forward gear. It failed about 3 years ago, and since they couldn't fix it, they just used it as a direct drive. Had to make sure you were pointed where you wanted to go before you pulled the starter cord! We traced it to a sheared off roll pin in the linkage pivot....quite simple except that it was located under the power head, so we had to disassemble half the motor to reach it, pull it out, drill out the broken pin, find a replacement (I used a 10 gauge stainless steel screw) and reassemble using the old gaskets. The repair went a bit slow....I had to move carefully to avoid stepping on one of the audience of spellbound 5 year olds, but when we finished it worked perfectly. They're pretty happy with that. The other two are REAL mysteries, both Johnson, both running just terribly for no apparent reason. We spent hours eliminating possible causes. No joy yet. Karen and I will stay another day so I can think about these things a little longer, and we can provide some more photos to the local kids, and get another good snorkel trip in. The lobster hunt last night turned out to be a complete bust, as the surf was a bit too rough and the prey wouldn't come up on the reef. But we've seen some pretty fish. The week's about shot anyway, so why rush back to Majuro? More soon. Ted