Long day and short post

The day started early because our friend Trevor came in this morning and I wanted to pick him up. Also, Carbon needed to move to his new work location, and I was surprised to find no tracks around any of the vehicles when I checked on them this morning. Uh oh.

Just about the first thing I do every morning is walk over to the cliff and count boats (if they've been launched) to be sure we haven't lost any, count buoys (same reason), and check how high the tide came up last night. This morning, I skipped the buoy counting routine because I was fully distracted (and somewhat panicked) to realize that none of the vehicles - the truck, the four-wheeler, and the ranger - had tire tracks leading to them. Only one reason for that: the tide washed the tracks away. The important next question is: what got wet besides the tires. With some anxiety, I went down and opened the driver's door - the one closest to the water, afraid that water would come out and... the floorboards were dry. The surprising thing to me was that I let that happen. The tide book warned me that the tide was going to be high - more than 24'. And I clocked the onshore wind at 26 MPH last night. That was going to push it higher.

All I can say is that we learned.

When we finally headed into town, we intended to take the beach access road but the tide had cut into it, making a 2' cliff, so we decided to drive all the way along the beach and come into town the old-fashioned way. Once there, we were able to do the necessary picking up and dropping off. And then we got serious about trying to get the boats ready.

We noticed yesterday (or the day before?) that the 25 hp outboard we use for our small skiff (the Grayling) wasn't spitting water as it ran. Today, Roy suggested that that might be due to a broken water pump in the lower unit. That thought occurred to him because he remembered how Josh and I brutalized it last year trying to get the lower unit apart and together again to do some maintenance. So Roger and I stopped loading the next tote of barge-stuff into the back of the truck (more clam chowder!), loaded up the 25 hp outboard to take it to John at Charlie's Sport Shop in King Salmon for repair - he is the Evinrude/Johnson whisperer. We would have picked up the Evinrude 45 we left with him over the winter, but he only accepts checks and cash and I had neither with me. But no matter - we figured we could get them both when the 25 is ready. During these preparations, we are also trying to help Roger get his welder up and running so he can start his welding side business. But it's hard to get the things we need to fix a leaky roof here - it's going to be even harder to get the things he needs to get the welder up and running. You can't just go to Ace hardware or Naknek Trading to get a bottle of argon and a regulator for the tank.

When we got back to AGS and began to focus on installing the back up outboard, a Yamaha 40 that we had just had in Seattle for repairs, we found that it had been traumatized in transit. Sigh. Cracked, split, and broken.

Sigh. I guess we'll need that 45 sooner than we thought. Sheesh. Looking more closely at the 60 hp outboard that we use on the Bathtub, we saw a corresponding crack, but decided just to go ahead and patch it to keep the water out. It wasn't also split and broken.

We tried to complete the preparations for the Bathtub by putting in the power pack that runs the hydraulics. Thanks to Roy, it starts and runs great -- but we discovered today that it doesn't stop. Sigh. Why not? Is the switch bad? Roger traded it for a switch on a power pack that we burned out a few years ago and that one didn't work either. Uh oh, maybe the problem isn't in the switch. Roy suggested that maybe the problem is the wire a little ways up the line, but who knows where. He told us to disconnect the switch from the wire and see if the engine would stop if we ground out the wire, and it didn't. He doesn't have the time to take it apart to find where it's broken (and we don't have the skill or the magic), so we'll limp along this season, turning off the fuel to get it to stop.

Meanwhile, David and Jeff went to pick up the truck formerly known as The Propane Truck, but even though they found it, they couldn't get it to keep running - probably because it was low on fuel. David tried to call me several times, but my phone was on the charger in the net locker. So they had to come back, truckless. Then David and I went, carrying 10 gallons of gas which, it turns out, we needed a funnel to pour into the tank. A little messing around and we got the tank half full and when David tried to start it, we found the battery was dead. So we jumped the battery - eventually (it was very dead) and took both vehicles back to the cannery. The guys used the crane to install the Yamaha 115 on the new boat and to help Roger explore his new welder.

All this stuff that goes wrong makes for a long day, but it isn't really unexpected. It's because this is a harsh environment - salty and cold, sometimes at the same time - and after hard use for two months, the equipment sits around for 10 months. It's not really too surprising that it's moody when we come back and wake it up.

We finally cried "Uncle" and headed home, hoping that the road people had fixed the drop off while we were in town. But it was Saturday... or they knew that we had more high tides to follow. I was a little worried about taking the truck down the mini-cliff.

I got out of the truck to see how the drop would hit the truck. I was worried about crushing the exhaust, but David backed up and re-oriented enough to drive on a palate on the driver's side and just barely stay on the crumbled cliff on the passenger side.

I'm not sure how they did it, but at the end of the day, they got the truck back up that hill.