Wow – what a wonderful day of boating!

Nothing went wrong…no, seriously NOTHING WENT WRONG!

I’m so stoked you can’t imagine it.  I woke up this morning at 6:15am, it was 36 degrees fahrenheit outside but the boat was toasty warm.  I spent the night at Shell Morgan marina plugged into wonderful 50amp service and the new heater purchased at walmart even kept my aft cabin perfectly warm.

The night before I’d had a video chat (facetime) with mom and dad and we spoke about the challenges and wonders of my new adventure.  When describing the problems with the starboard engine I left off with the fact that I’d had good water flow for the first 5 minutes of running it the day before, after fixing the seal on the sea strainer, and that the water flow then stopped.

I said I wasn’t giving up on the engine yet, and that I didn’t think I had a blown head gasket or warped head because it hadn’t gotten that hot (214 degrees on the exhaust elbow was the max).

Mom says, did you pray for it yet?  HA!!!  Actually I had thought about praying for the engine but for whatever reason my ego took me to task for it.

I said, “No, but I’ve thought about it.”  Mom says, “OK, well do you want to start or you want dad to start?”

So matter-of-fact, it was awesome.  I love my mom.

“I’ll start.” I said.  The prayer was simple, short, and right to the point.  Something along the lines of: ‘God, if there’s something I really need to learn from this engine smoking or overheating then no problem, I’m in your hands.  If, however, I’ve learned enough about it and you can just fix it for me, that’d be awesome ’cause I could sure use a break.’

That was it.

Amens were said, and I said, hey – let’s try it out!??

I started up the engine last night and had perfect waterflow – I let it run at both an idle and at 1300 rpm for 15 to 20 minutes and she ran perfectly, no white smoke or steam, and water flow was awesome.

Today, same thing.  I got into a ritual of checking the exhaust water every 15 minutes until I trusted it, but she ran perfectly!

Thank you God / Universe / everyone!