one step forward, two steps back..

so, no luck yet on the tranny. many thanks to that handful of sweet people who have asked for updates...

allen just spent two nights in panama city waiting for the part to be ready. mind you they told us it would be ready thursday. so he went to the city on friday thinking that was a safe bet....but it wasn't ready until yesterday afternoon.....at which point Joe the Mechanic looked at it and concluded it was not finely machined enough, so he's going to take it back to the shop Monday and see it they can redo it......this is not so fun. every night that we're paying to have the boat in a marina and paying for a hotel room too just makes us shake our heads and wonder what the hell we're gonna do. not to mention paying the mechanic which we haven't thought through yet. So in the last three days we basically accomplished nothing while spending money in the city.

if they can't get the part machined to a satisfactory state of precision then things will get even more complicated, as that would mean ordering a replacement....and evidently our transmission is so old and obscure that even the guys at the company that manufactured it can't identify the model despite the barrage of photos and serial numbers we've e-mailed to them. yikes. and the coupler itself was redone at some point over the years so it's not a standard thing we can order.

ah, the joys of yacht ownership......