June 11: Jake arrived! (And so did another set of wrong steering cables)

Yay, Jake!! Argh, steering cable. The box says to measure the plastic sheath from ferrule to ferrule (that's the crimped metal part at the end of the plastic sheath) and that's the length of the steering cable. Except that's not how the outboard people think about them. So the first cable with the 6' sheath was known to the outboard people as an 8' cable. I didn't remember asking for a 6' cable, but I couldn't be sure. So it never occurred to me that when we ordered another cable from another vendor... they too would ignore the instructions on the box. So, we got another 6' cable. Such disappointment.

On the positive side, as I was very very carefully measuring the new wrong steering cable to try to figure out why the outboard people would call the 6' cable an 8' cable so that I could apply the same formula to the old steering cable to translate those 8' into something that would get us the right cable, (it goes something like, "by 8', I mean 10' not 6'") Chuck, another fisherman happened by and started to help me loosen it up. That gave Roy hope for the old one and he set to work on it in earnest and got it freed up enough to at least get us in the water. So we are hopeful about tomorrow's activities. We may not actually be able to put the Ambi into service tomorrow, but at least we'll be one step closer to having it when we really need it after we find out if it can continue to run at full throttle or if it just dies down to a stately pace after a minute or two of zipping about. I never really open it up anyway, so I was thinking that if necessary, we could manage with a stately pace all summer. But then it has been so windy and I thought about how tricky it is to get away from the beach in a strong wind - then we need some power. So I can't settle for a stately pace.

Meanwhile, Rohan will bring a third set of steering cables up when he comes Friday morning, so we will have a new set that may not be installed this season after all, but we'll probably need them next season. And I think he'll find a way to squeeze a new fuel tank and lines for the Ambi into his luggage, just in case the problem is sea monkeys somewhere along the line that stop the flow of fuel.

The news on the 115 is not as good. Roy let me know that a piece is just missing - when the outboard people fixed the outboard, they must have left that piece off. Huh? I suppose it can happen. But they didn't still have it lying around so then it's a matter of getting a new one. If they had one on hand, Rohan could bring it early Friday morning when he gets in... but apparently, they didn't have one on hand. So that's one that must be ordered. My mind boggles to consider the many ways something can go wrong in that process - including the ways that have already been demonstrated this summer. Someone I don't know did something very helpful one time. We were in the middle of some catastrophe or another and he grinned over at me and said, "That's fishing!" That is. So, this is fishing.

In today's wildlife news, we saw these eagles on the way into town. Just yesterday, Pat Patterson, my great childhood friend from Naknek told me that no, there are no Golden Eagles here in Naknek. Many people would think the eagles in this photo are Goldens because they are so huge, but they are juvenile Bald Eagles that look bigger than the mature Bald Eagles because they still have a lot of their downy feathers. As they age, they will shed these feathers and slim down.

And I should mention that Roger and Jeff got the wash down working a few days ago - I might have mentioned that earlier, but I don't remember. But it's an important accomplishment. And the ranger is back in the shop. A tire went flat; I'm not sure how. And when it had a heavy load to pull, it just died instead of spinning in its tracks. A clutch problem? I hope not. I believe that the shop doesn't have a way to solve a clutch problem (that is - no new clutches on hand). But just as I wrote that, I realized that if it does need a new clutch, they could take the clutch from the Killer Ranger and just order a new one in for that machine.

Finally, we started scraping the paint from the Janice E today, the boat that Harry fishes, concerned that some of it may be structural. It's raining, though, so I don't know about priming and then painting it. We may finally get the chance to work under the mysterious light of the Blue Tarp.