Shiny New Motor Mounts and Pretty Cascarones

Whenever you get an invite to visit a sailboat in some foreign harbor, you can expect “the list.” Boat parts are somewhat hard to ship overseas, get lost in transit and, after a long wait, subject to a lot of fees which can be avoided if someone packs them up with a couple of bikinis, flipflops and t-shirts. We tried to keep our list for the Fuchs visit short and it came to: four Yanmar motor mounts, a new battery charger, a new solar light for the cockpit, printer ink cartridges and our Coast Guard documentation renewal. All our goodies came in time for the trip except the coast guard renewal. It was sitting in the mailbox when they got back. We have an emailed copy which we printed in color. Now we have to decide whether to rely on the emailed document for the next port of entry or wait on the original.

Randall working on the forward motor mounts which are hard to access through the cockpit floor.

Randall loosening the bolt with a little box-end wrench because there is no room for a socket handle.

Randall has been busy all week with the motor mount project. We are taking the old rusty mounts off one at a time so the motor/transmission/saildrive stays in decent alignment while Randall removes a mount, paints underneath and sets and screws in the new mount. We have the two aft mounts all done and are now tackling the harder-to-reach forward mounts. I say “we” because I tapped a hammer on a hard-to-reach socket handle once. Whew! Strenuous engine work. Here are some more pics of Randall being awesome:

Old rusty motor mount with the connecting rubber about to give way completely.

Two shiny motor mount with clean white paint underneath.

Lily and I have been getting ready for Easter by making cascarones. Cascarones are confetti-filled eggshells which are made for many Central American fiestas. You blow the yolk out of the egg through a small hole, decorate, fill with confetti or rice/birdseed for eco-friendly eggs and then glue tissue paper over the opening. We will be improvising with toilet paper glued over the opening. Also, Lily thinks small bits of candy would make a festive filling. I am not sure if she plans to leave the candy for the monkeys and chickens or try to pick it out of the eggshell herself. She is a little mad at the monkeys right now so they might not get any candy. She is working on a post to her Sweetwater classmates with some details on monkey misbehavior so I will post that tomorrow when she gets all the caps, punctuation and creative spelling corrected.

Cascarones. Mr. and Mrs. Humpty Dumpty are too precious to break.