A few months back, my outboard (an old Evinrude 45) got wet feet. A pneumonia of the mechanical kind spread upwards and the resulting congestion blew the head and did irreparable damage. It was junked.

Sometimes I feel one with my engine and this was one of those times.

But I am not yet destined for that great salvage yard in the sky and so the hunt for its replacement was begun. Last week I found a good used Honda 50 and bought it. The 250 pound, awkward shaped apparatus was deftly put in to the back of the Pathfinder by two burly, monosylabic mechanics under Sally’s supervision. “Hey! Shouldn’t that motor be sitting on it’s other side. What with the oil filler tube being where it is and all……?”

Wondering who the hell he was dealing with he replied, “Yes, maám. You are right. C’mon, Charlie, let’s take it out again and turn it around.”

Sal’s good. I arrived after doing the paperwork and payment, we then proceeded to fill the rest of the back with steer manure (bagged) and a couple of totes and a cooler full of groceries. We stopped by the wine store and picked up five boxes of wine and then stopped at the hardware store for sundries, the Japanese store for gyoza and frozen fish and then we added a couple of 50 pound bags of dog food together with two 40 pound frozen-but-raw-meat boxes of dog food added later. I guess we were carrying about five hundred to 600 pounds in the back of the SUV.

“Not as much of a load this trip. Just as well since we are using the little boat. And it is kinda blowy. Those clouds look bad.”

“We should be good. It is blowing all right but it’s a Nor-wester. We are going with it. No freeboard to speak of, tho. Glad the dogs aren’t with us.”

“I think – to be on the safe side – we’ll leave the motor in the car until I have the big boat in the water. Come back then. May as well leave the steer manure, too.”

“Good idea”.

It’s been four days and everything is still in the parking lot. We’ve been busy. The big boat got it’s bottom painted yesterday and the holes I had addressed earlier were sealed up. It should float now. Later today, we’ll lash it against the little boat and, like a tug with a barge, head over to the other island to get the stuff.

The technique is to drive the car down the hill and over the beach to the water’s edge. Then we get everything out and into the big boat leaving the engine for last. When that is done, we spin the boat around so that it is stern-to and then we ‘wiggle’ the motor out of the back and then tip it onto the close-at-hand stern. With it weighing more than me that means the placing and tipping points we choose are critical.

We can do this. Once it is on, we tighten it on using the convenient but largely useless hand-tighteners and the little boat Siamese tugs it back to the house where I will spend a bit of time bolting it on and hooking up gas and electrics.

Should get done by tomorrow at the very latest. ‘Course we will have to get the manure and stuff up today.

It is not much of a chore, really. Just a shopping trip. With a bit of boat maintenance interrupting us and the sheer bloody weight of everything. But we had to do other chores, too, like take apart the chainsaw winch for the umpteenth time, do some volunteer work, write some stuff up for a friend, entertain two separate parties and keep the dogs and homestead humming along all at the same time.

Not to mention Sal’s making every meal from scratch and doing so to a whole raft of new recipes.

A woman’s work is never done, eh? Despite my scheduling and best efforts at supervision, Sal seems to be falling behind more and more these days. But, you know, yelling doesn’t really help, does it? Mind you, she also worked the garden and cleaned the woood stove, replacing all the firebrick. I should cut her some slack, I guess. I’ll lighten up.

Her annual review is coming up in a few weeks, anyway. I hope she gets a good report, don’t you?