Transmission trouble? Again? Really?!?

We went to the town of Midland after we left the Trent Severn. There are very few towns of any size on the Georgian Bay and Midland is the first of the available reprovisioning stops. Since it is high boating season up here, we have reverted to our usual behavior of pulling in somewhere for the week end and leaving the water and anchorages for the locals who have to work during the week.

Jim changed the oil in the engines while we were in Midland and while he was running the engines after the oil change he noticed a "coffee grinder" sound coming from the starboard transmission in idle, like something was loose in there. Not good. So rather than leaving Monday morning, as had been our plan, we pulled across Midland Harbor to Bay Point Marina to have their mechanics take a listen to the transmission. Yup, they agreed with Jim, it sounded bad in idle. Interestingly enough, the sounds quit if he rev'd the engine higher.

Do we need to replace the transmission? We are already the only Endeavour Trawlercat to have ever needed to replace a transmission and now the second one is gone less than a month after the first? Really? Just to make it all more interesting, there is no replacement transmission available in Canada. Are we looking at another drive down to New Jersey to pick up another transmission? Can you take a Canadian rental car to the U.S.? Can you come back over the border with a $2,000 boat part in your trunk? Spirits were a wee bit low on the good ship Down Time.

Fortunately, Jim has cultivated a slew of support people over the years, folks he can call when he has a problem he can't figure out. This time he called a guy at Mastry, the company that sold the engines for this boat to Endeavour. He recognized the problem immediately, even describing the symptoms to Jim before Jim had a chance to describe them himself. A simple tweak of the idle RPMs and the problem disappeared. Hallelujah!

Tomorrow we're off to the Georgian Bay anchorages. Wish us luck!