Salt, Salt Everywhere

Our days are numbered here at the marina.  They number 6 as of today.  By God, that's our story.  That's the plan and come hellish weather and high water we're outta here...well, at least to Boot Key Harbor around the corner.  We utter this as a declaration now to all who, with unnerving smirks, ask when we'll be leaving.  Our slip lease expires on the 10th and if we do not leave as planned there is only one explanation.  We died and didn't notice.  If that's the case, you can probably guess to which eternal plane of existence we'd believe that we'd been relegated.

Easy peasy

All this pondering of being bewitched, falling victim to a conspiracy, facing doom, suffering eternal damnation and whatnot has been brought about by the freak circumstances that surround the demise of our generator.  The generator, mind you, that energetically supports our brand spankin' new air conditioner and the old one as well and that without which we will surely wilt whilst in the tropics.

Briefly put, the flywheel, which I'm told is an important part of the motor, had become encased in salt.  So completely encased that it wouldn't turn over, wouldn't even budge.  For those curious as to the technical explanation, I'll explain as concisely as possible:  Because of the way marine generators are designed, that's not supposed to happen.  As hard as Mike, the SALT (no chilling pun intended) technician cum our oldest and dearest friend tried, he couldn't fix it in place.  So out it came yesterday, all 392 pounds of it on the shoulders of most of SALT's staff.

...for me, anyway.

I'm happy to report that once the generator was freed from the boat and with two manpowers of force, the flywheel finally broke free.  It should come home from the hospital on Tuesday, barring everything.

With a grain of this now wholly superfluous substance, I wonder about the timing of all this.  We did just install a watermaker whose brine discharge is a mere 39 feet forward of our generator.  No, we haven't run the generator since the watermaker was put in, not at all since we've been here.  So there is no logical way for the former to have sucked up salt from the latter and spew it all over itself.  But if some supernatural force has it in for us that would be more or less irrelevant, wouldn't it?