Wrightsville Beach, NC

This is our third time visiting Wrightsville Beach and we have only just discovered that it is one of the most popular surf spots in the country. We took a long walk along the beach this morning and there were more than 50 surfers out there trying to catch the perfect wave. The town itself is reminiscent of San Diego, with piers and arcades and surf shops and people everywhere. We forgot that school is out, which means that all the local kids borrow the keys to daddy's speedboat and come barreling through the anchorage throwing up tremendous wakes that wreak havoc by rocking all the anchored boats. We watched the Coast Guard pull over two boats packed with kids and laughed when we saw the kids have to dig through lockers to count all the life jackets (you get fined if there isn't at least one life jacket for every person on board). Sweet revenge.

We *think* we have conquered our genset overheating problem. All of our genset coolant was left over from the previous owner and he wrote "50-50" on the bottles with a permanent marker. There is one sentence in the manual that reads "a 50-50 coolant/water mix will almost certainly result in overheating" (a clue!). So Kevin tried adding a little more water to dilute the coolant and then increasing the load (turning on the small air conditioner and then adding the big air conditioner) until the genset temperature stabilized at around 185 (meanwhile the temp in the boat got down to a frigid 72 -- go air conditioning!). So thinning the coolant with water seemed to do the trick. However, water mixing in with other fluids isn't so great, as we are learning with our starboard saildrive (fancy word for the thing that spins the propellers on the boat). The saildrive has its own special oil which you check regularly and somehow ours seems to have gotten a little water mixed in, which is not good. Normally to change the saildrive oil the boat needs to be hauled out of the water so that you can drain it out the bottom of the propeller shaft, but if the boat is in the water you can get about half of the oil out through the top with a pump, which is what we tried. The oil came out looking all cloudy and not at all like oil (not good), but we were glad that we'd at least be able to replace half of it with new oil until we haul out. And that's when things went wrong.

When we were in Charleston we had stopped in at Pep Boys to pick up spare saildrive oil and had bought four quarts of the stuff (75W-90). We did not realize at the time that two of the quarts we'd grabbed were actually 75W-140 Light Truck & SUV Formula, which had been mishshelved. Those numbers on the label mean something -- all oils are not created equal. Unfortunately we only discovered this after dumping a quart of Light Truck & SUV Formula into our BOAT! So once again we had to pump out the oil, but the consistency of the wrong oil was like honey and it proved to be as difficult as sucking a milkshake through a cocktail straw. Kevin's patience paid off and he was able to get almost all of the bad oil back out after a couple hours' work. But now we are thinking we will want to haul the boat out sooner than we'd planned so we can resolve the saildrive issue and try to figure out how water could've gotten in there in the first place.