Instead we worked every single day for the entire month, 30 straight days! We were up at 6:00am trying to get an hour or two of work in on our other project list. Then again at the end of the day, after the mechanics left, we would work another hour or two into the night on our projects. Then it was shower time, grab a quick bite to eat for dinner and do it all over aging the next day. During the mechanics day from 8:00 to 4:00 we had to help them with the engine installation, why, because if we turned our backs on them for a minute we would find things done all wrong. If this was Trinidad's best we sure would hate to see its second best. The guys (mechanics) were wonderful people, very, very nice guys. Their only problem was their attention to details was non-existent. If we ere ever to do it again, we would install it ourselves. Paying the experts or at least the experts of the West Indies just meant we had to watch them do it wrong three or four times. We finally give up on them and did the detailed work ourselves. Here is just a brief example: the new engines motor mounts were in different positions than the old engine. We needed to have new brackets made. If it were up to us we would have measured the distance difference from the old engine to the new and calculated the difference required for the new brackets. Simple right. Well the guys insisted that the way they must do it was to first remove the old engine without ever having even picked up a tape measure to measure anything. Then place the new engine in the boat which we had to waited three days to get the crane lined up to pickup the new engine. They then muscled the new engine into the boat and placed it on wooden block in the kitchen! Then they pushed it around trying to visually guess at the proper alignment. They guessed at how much the brackets needed to be changed to achieve this estimate/visual alignment. Then they took the old brackets to a welding shop. Waited a day to get the brackets welded, sand blasted and painted. Now with the brackets back they could install them in the boat. Then they muscled the new engine around and placed it on the brackets. They quickly discovered the brackets were not correct. This meant do it again and again and again! This is the West Indies way…. It would have been five times if we didn't finally get so fed up after three wrong times, that we calculated the change for them and insisted that the use our calculation! Guess what, it work perfectly.
During this whole seven-day process we had to climb over the engine to move around our boat. Worse than that the stairs to get from the topside of the boat down into the inside were off because the engine was sitting there. So we had to climb up the six-foot drop to get in or out of the boat. It seemed we needed to do this exercise at least a hundred times a day.
We could bore you with example after example but we will spare you. Lets just say that at first because we don't consider ourselves mechanics we let them do it their way. After all they were suppose to be the experts, the very best Trinidad had to offer. Plus we were paying them so figured why should we do every thing for them. As the days painfully wore on we stopped being so patient. We had to question everything they did. At least by question everything up front things didn't need to be redone multiple times. It basically ended up that we did the engine installation and had to spend a lot of extra time cleaning up the problems they created. So we worked like DOGS non-stop! We haven't worked that hard for that long in a really long time! That engine project made our old Silicon Valley job look easy.
The good new is when we launched the boat and took her out on her sea trial the new motor ran absolutely great!
Wouldn't you know, the perfect state of everything working, all systems serviced and functioning properly lasted about 30 seconds! We thought that everything working beautifully. We were in the water just in time to rush out of Trinidad and sail to Grenada to meet our friends Neil and Barbara. We never even saw anything of Trinidad but the boatyard. No sight seeing, nothing but work. Within 30 seconds of pulling off the boatyard dock the throttle cable broke! So we entered Trinidad with a broken transmission and we left Trinidad with broken throttle cables. The perfect world had lasted 30 seconds and a new problem got added to the project list! We do have double helm stations: one outside and one inside so we were able to use the inside throttle and to jerry-rig the broken outside throttle cable to safely continue on our way. Boat projects…the list just never ever seems to end. But, like we always say…sure beats any day in the office!