When the woman from the Dockmaster's office came around to collect the fee, she said she had to check all the holding tanks. She gave me two dye tablets and told me to put them in my "head" (marine toilet) and flush it. What a joke! If they really wanted to check holding tanks, they'd come aboard and flush them themselves. Anybody who doesn't have a proper holding tank is just going to fake it. I put the tablets in my Porta-Potti and flushed it. Of course, we "passed"; there's no connection whatsoever between my pot and the surrounding water.
Our little push-button radio hasn't worked for a long time. That is, it works but it's barely audible. Roy dismounted it last night, and I took it downtown on the bus this morning. Left it at a shop for an estimate, bought a few groceries, and headed back to the boat.
When I reached the dinghy dock, I was surprised to see a little inflatable rowboat that looked just like mine tied there. I thought, "Well, what do you know! Someone else has a rowboat like mine, and they're using it for a dinghy. I'll have to show it to Roy; he's been wanting to know what mine looks like inflated, and this one's exactly the same. I wonder if Roy's on the boat. Oh yes, there's his Royak on the deck, so he's on the boat." A few minutes later, I noticed there was a black bicycle bag in the rowboat. It looked a lot like one of our bicycle bags. In fact, it looked exactly like one of our bicycle bags. In fact -- it WAS one of our bicycle bags! Then I realized that Roy had inflated the rowboat and brought his bicycle ashore in it! I could scarcely believe it. When he returned, he told me he'd had to go all over town for an additional piece of cable for the new radar. Without his bike he couldn't have done it. He finally did get the cable, so now he can finish installing the new radar.
At five o'clock, I phoned the radio repair place. They said there was nothing at all wrong with the radio; the problem was probably in the wiring or maybe the speaker.
When I got back to the dock, Roy was talking with another cruising couple. They had a rental car, and they offered to drive us and the old radar to Sailorman tomorrow to try to sell it. We'd been wondering what we were going to do with it. When Roy had removed the old cable, it had practically disintegrated in his hands. It's a wonder the radar had worked at all. So the monitor and radome are perfectly good; it was just the cable that needed to be replaced. We hoped we could sell the old radar but didn't have time to wait for someone to buy it. Sailorman sells stuff on consignment, but we didn't know how we'd get the thing down there on the bus; it's pretty big. It's really nice of Irwin and Jackie to offer to drive us down there. That solves a major problem. It would have been a shame to have just thrown it away. In return, Roy gave Irwin the connectors from the ends of the new cable. Roy had no need for them, and Irwin did.
No comments:
Post a Comment