Syzygy Sailing

I’ll admit it, I don’t normally buy used. I bought a new car. I bought a new condo. Consequently, I rarely have to fix things. In fact, when I tried to make a very minor fix to something in my condo a month ago — my refrigerator — I ended up breaking it. Snapped a coolant tube. Oops. So I had to replace the fridge. You may have guessed it, I didn’t buy a used model; I bought a new one. I think I inherited this behavior from my parents, who also almost always do they same thing. I also never really had experiences hanging around with my dad on Sundays, head under the hood of the car, tinkering and fixing. I’m OK with that. I get to spend my time on other things. Hey, we all make choices on where our time goes. So this whole fixing-old-stuff thing, like a 30-year-old boat, is relatively new to me.

So I spent a couple of days trying to fix our boat’s packing gland, which is the fixture around the hole through the hull where the propeller shaft enters the boat. Clearly, if this leaks, there is a problem. Ours leaks: clearly a problem. At least it only leaks sometimes…

The packing gland is right next to the engine, so it’s kinda dirty. I wanted to clean it and asked Matt and Jonny how. “Use acetone,” they said. So I grab the acetone and pour it into a bowl in the kitchen. I dab the cloth rag I’m using into it, go back to the engine room (two feet away) and wipe along the propeller shaft. All good so far; it looks cleaner. I go back to the kitchen, dab, back to the engine room, wipe. Cleaner. This process gets repeated a few times until I’m finished cleaning and decide to tidy up my materials.

Back in the kitchen, however, acetone has shown why it’s such a good cleaner, and has begun to eat through the cheapo plastic bowl that I put the acetone in. Oops. The bottom of the bowl is a gooey mess, and when I pick up the bowl the bottom separates from the rest of it, and acetone spills out of the now-bottomless bowl, and gooey plastic strings dangle in the air. Good stuff. Matt laughs hysterically at me.

The plastic bowl happened to be located on our wooden cutting board in our kitchen and now we have a permanent red strain on our cutting board — a memento, if you will.

At least the packing gland is clean.