Sunday, July 23, 2000

1:34 a.m. The marital favor bank. That mystical balance of checks and doublechecks, slides and balances. I made a big deposit into my account today, and I'm rich indeed. We spent the entire day on the boat. The entire day.

But even before that, we went to an antique boat show and wandered past nice old wooden yachts all shined to a fare-thee. And old cars and garsh, even old motors all running and sputtering and spitting and chugging. Could there *be* any more interesting way to spend a Sunday? Men with greasy rags, polishing up ole Bessie?

Eventually, we climbed aboard our own ole Bessie, ready to take to the pounding main. Oh, but it was not to be. I have put in an heroic day in the docks, tending to our ancient, but useless outboard motor, swabbing at it with my own greasy rag, but just like the stubborn wench that she is, she would not turn over.

It was pretty hot in the Marina basin today. I sat on top of the boat and put one thousand really greasy slimy screw-type things into all the holes in the big sail so that it could slide up and down the main pole, aka a mast. There is a preponderance of AKAs on a sailing boat and my husband, aka Igor, knows and loves them all.

It took a goodly hour to unscrew and fumble and then rescrew all the sail dohickies (sic) onto the sail. Meanwhile, Igor attached an extra jib sail, which is an extra sail you hang onto the front pol I mean, mast. At this point, we now have both original sails back on the boat.

This photo shows the main sail, with the Coronado insignia, which is an iron-on from the sail-sewer's shop because I was too otherwise occupied to be bothered with making a custom new one from the old ripped one, and now I'm really sorry. On my worst sewing day, I would have done a better job than this. Bah.

The number "27" is the size of the boat. Can you imagine if everyone wore a sign with their size displayed for all the world to see? I think our boat actually looks bigger than 27 feet, but that's probably because I'm sentimental. The second number, 315, means that this was the 315th boat off the assembly line, in the special style of whatever style our boat is. That's sort of impressive, maybe.

In any event, it was getting hotter and hotter in the blazing sun and even I could see the benefit of getting out on the waves and getting some nice cooling breeze. Unfortunately, when Igor yanked the starter pull on the motor, it shredded off and broke in half on the very first pull. This is either a lucky break or a major disappointment, depending.

Neither Igor nor I are motor people. We are book people, and luckily we had a book about this particular motor right on board the boat. We read the information about replacing the string that wraps around the thing that starts the motor and we eventually even removed the string itself and took it to the handy nearby boat supermarket and got another string, rope, pulley -- whatever.

Fingers got bashed, sweat poured from brows, grease was smeared, and after quite a long time, we were totally amazed and impressed with our combined selves as we put the lid back on the motor. Perfect starter-string replacement. Yank yank. Good yanking -- it works perfectly.

All the yanking in the world wasn't going to change the fact that the motor wouldn't start and it wasn't going to. Not if Igor sucked out the gasoline hose or if I undid a nozzle and splashed gasoline all over myself or even if Igor replaced the sparkplugs. Not even if. No way -- not today. I was actually sad about it, I have to admit. I was ready to go beyond the breakwater and brave the ocean wide.

Maybe next week.

As a final note, we had plenty of time to watch the second movie we rented: Circuitry Man. This would be, for the almost half-hour that we managed to watch, possibly the worst movie I've seen in a very long time. My rule of thumb: if it's in the science-fiction aisle, I will pretty much like something about it. And there are plenty of good sci-fi movies that have only been released to video, so it's not that crazy to bring home one that you've never seen before. Plus, I pride myself on having seen just about every one of them. Except this one.

Do not rent this one. It's worse than spending a day with your fingers jammed in a hot, greasy grimy motor cam shaft casing pulley thingy. Believe me. I know.