One thing leading to another

It's always one thing leading to another... I had a few free hours today so I decided to run by Second Wave to see if I could find a replacement clevis pin for our anchor roller at the bow, the original having been bent and fractured by whatever unholy forces ripped the boat from its mooring last fall. I have been meaning to do this for a while but the day I usually have available for boat stuff is Sunday, which also happens to be the day Second Wave is closed.

Since I don't have any of the original documentation or the brand name of the roller, I decided to go to the boat first to retrieve the pin first so as to be able to compare the size directly to potential replacements (ever mindful of the water pump hose adapter fiasco).

It developed, however, that despite it's damaged state, the pin was in no mood to come the rest of the way out. A clever design impeded it from being pulled out entirely after insertion; the manner in which it was bent prevented it from being pushed completely through the other side... and yet it was not bent enough to simply pull it out without going through the opposite hole.

"Well, it's already bent up pretty good," I said to myself. "I'll just bend it a little more, and voila, as the French sailors say... it will pop right out!"

Nuh-uh. My vise grips and pliers wouldn't budge it. In fact, the roller assembly started to flex before the pin showed any sign of bending further, deepening the mystery of what the heck actually happened to the boat last fall all the more.

"Well, then," I said to myself. "I'll just unbolt the roller itself, which should allow me to flex the roller assembly enough to drop the pin out."

But here is where the predicament of my position checked me; the anchor roller, necessarily, is the furthest forward object on the boat, out over the water, and if there is a sure and certain law of the sea, more dire in consequence than setting sail on a Friday, more inevitable than poor weather after red sky in the morning, it is that if you go mucking about with nuts, bolts, tools, or other small objects over the side, you're going to drop one or more of them into the soup.

A good rule in these situations is to solicit the assistance of others... but at 10AM on a Friday morning, the dock was deserted. I wasn't ready to quit yet, though, so I decided I'd put together my own fail-safe system: I would lash the roller to the forestay, so even if it dropped unexpectedly it would simply dangle.

That done, I hauled out a crescent wrench and a ratchet and went to work. But not for long--the ratchet was broken, and simply spun around aimlessly without gripping the socket. Time to buy a new ratchet.

I considered going at it with two crescent wrenches but that was just tempting things too much... I'd lose a nut for certain. So I put everything away and scratched the clevis pin plan for the moment.

I did swing by Second Wave anyway, though, and I wanted to plug them again... it's a great place to look for anything nautical. I needed some other stuff for a mooring pennant I am also putting together, and I wanted to see if they had any outboards in our size range. They had a 2.5 horse Tohatsu which would probably have been fine, but it was already sold. I picked up a length of 5/8" mooring line, and when I went to check out, the guy at the counter said, "That looks a little pricey, doesn't it?"

I told him that everything looked pretty pricey to me these days, and he said, "Well, let's fix that," and knocked 30% right off! There's no way he could have known that I just recommended the store to someone last week, but he made me glad that I had, and confident in the referral.