Highways and Timing

Sunday, August 7th

The transmission, and crew, are back in Southern Maine, nearly 300 miles from Cygnus.

The trip from Eastport took us along “The Airline“, the famous stretch of Maine’s East-West Route 9 from Calais to Brewer. It’s actually a scenic ride, and gives a real sense of the “Other” Maine for those of us who live in what some consider suburban Boston.

The transmission shop in Massachusetts will start pulling together the rebuilt transmission tomorrow, and when all the parts are ready we’ll swap them for ours, which will go into the shop’s inventory for a future rebuild. This is the quickest way to ensure a good, reliable replacement. We’re working on our options for getting parts and crew all back to Cygnus.

Although it’s certainly nothing we would have wished for, the timing of this breakdown was uncannily fortunate.

We’d just re-entered Maine, instead of stopping at a small port in Nova Scotia or, worse yet, the island of Grand Manan. I’m quite sure the fishing fleet in those locations has options when a transmission fails, but access to a shop that specializes in rebuilding several of these specific model transmissions every day surely cut the time frame for the repair way down.

Eastport is also home to a boatyard owned by our new friend Dean, who seems like an exceptionally honest and knowledgeable guy, along with two of his workers, Matt and Brian, who are both very skilled and work well together as a team.

We got back home just in time for a family gathering to celebrate a birthday and a milestone anniversary, and got an unexpected chance to spend time with everyone here.

The loop adventure will continue, but in the meantime we’re able to get some chores done around the house, re-provision and get a well-needed haircut. And, we have both cell service AND high-speed internet connectivity!

Note: I’ve gone back and added some photos to the two previous posts. See the “Previous” link, below, to check them out.