Blasting off

We are finally ready to leave Fort Lauderdale!  Maybe!

   Yesterday, we took a serious walking tour of Fort Lauderdale in search of the two parts that would finally fix our toilet.  We started at Sailorman, which is a gigantic used marine stuff store, where "every day is a flea market."  It was awesome.  It was like the part of the quest where we met The Sage- a gigantic room full of mysterious treasures and wizened, gnomelike old men who know everything.  We found a new deck fitting for our water fill, a twisted shackle for the traveler, 15 feet of 3/16th line (much to the chagrin of the salesman, who really thought I needed 18, or even 20 feet.  Shows how much he knows) and best of all, a new clevis pin to replace the one I dropped in the water.  That last one was most satisfying- the clevis pin is what connects the open end of a shackle.  It is tiny and looks like this:

What up, clevis?

   We were looking through card catalogs full of these things, trying to match the length, diameter and head size exactly.   It was like looking for a needle in a haystack made out of other needles.  Also like looking for shark's teeth at Calvert Cliffs.  When we finally found one, they let us take it for free, impressed by our persistence. 
   We also found out a lot about our toilet.  Erica came up huge by remembering what brand it is, and by flipping through the catalog we found the toilet that is the modern equivalent of the one that we have.  That let us find the number of the replacement parts for the ones that I broke.  The gnomes at Sailorman told us to go to the marine wholesaler down the street, who unfortunately did not have the part on hand.  They in turn sent us to the Raritan store, where they had no idea what we were talking about.  In the end, we didn't get the part we needed...but, we at least found out that it exists, and have come up with a scheme for a temporary fix until we can track down the real part.  It was more walking than we had planned on, but it was fun to enter the world of people who actually know about boats, where you can actually get parts to fix things instead of replacing them entirely.   Then we went to West Marine and didn't buy anything- another major triumph.
   This afternoon, we overhauled the rigging.  All the halyards were run so that they needlessly crossed over one another at the top of the mast, so we untwisted all of them.  We put a reef in the mainsail, because unreefed it is too big for the boat. We rerigged the boom lift, and took two mysterious bolts out of the mast that were supporting the bottom of the boom for no particular reason.  Actually, I have a hypothesis, which is that if the boom lift doesn't work because you tied it in stupid knots, and you wanted to lift the boom so it wouldn't swing at head level, you might think that it would be a good idea to shove two bolts into the mast underneath the boom to hold it up, instead of just fixing the boom lift.  It's just a theory, but I defy anyone to come up with a better explanation. 

   Tomorrow, we're going to get up early and start heading south.  The plan is to go to an anchorage about 13 miles south of our slip, so when things get complicated and we don't actually leave early it will be okay.  It looks like we'll have about two days of motoring until things open up enough for us to start sailing for real. We also got the camera back today, so we will get back to putting up our own pictures.