Wednesday, July 16, 2008

It's Fixed, Or Is It?

Bohemia River
N 39 25.570 W 075 56.309

We spent two days on a mooring at Georgetown Yacht Basin (GYB) to get our refrigerator fixed. Ken, the repairman, tested the thermostat and confirmed that it was bad. So they ordered a new one from Technautics, the manufacturer, and it took only a few minutes to install it. As soon as it was done, we departed.

The weather forecast calls for a window of 10-15 southerly winds offshore for Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We really want to take advantage of that. To get to Cape May by tomorrow morning, we need to enter the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal at first light tomorrow. On simply never fights the +/- 5 knot current in this canal. It's much too fast.

Now, having motored for 4 hours with the fridge running, the plate is frozen only halfway up. Uh oh. I just put some more coolant in it, to chase out a couple of air bubbles I see in the sight glass. If that doesn't fix it, then we have still another problem. I sure hope not. We spent more than $400 in the past two weeks trying to fix it so far.

Our fridge problem illustrates one of the pitfalls of a nomadic lifestyle. In normal circumstances, when one pays a repairman to fix something, and it still doesn't work, one takes it back to the same man. In our case, by the time we figure out that the repair didn't work, we have moved on and we aren't about to turn back. That behavior can add greatly to the expense and the time to get things done right.

In any case, GYB has a very nice swimming pool, and we made good use of it the past two days. Just now, I jumped in to the river to cool off. The water is fresh and no stinging sea nettles live this far up the bay so swimming is nicer.

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