Volvo Parts from Mark and visit to Jak's

I drove the RX7 to Port Townsend and visited Mark.

The first person I saw when I walked into the office was Zee, the mechanical wizard who had worked on my Sabb engine in 2009.  It was good to see him again and we had a short conversation about the demise of the Sabb on Pachuca.  Soon Seth the office manager walked and although I had not seen him since 2009 I had spoken with him several times by telephone during the repowering saga.

Mark pointed to the alternator on the floor and told me that it was still warm from the bench testing that he had just completed.  The results were not clear cut but Mark described the alternator as "lazy" and not performing to the standard that he expected, even though he managed to get it to produced the full 115 amps of output at one point.  If I understood correctly, I will get a new alternator and Mark will be discussing with Volvo the threshold setting of the alternator.  None of us thinks that the system should produce a failure alarm simply because the alternator is dealing with a battery bank at low voltage ("low" being 13.1 V).

Seth produced my new Volvo single-lever throttle and gear control as well as the replacement buzzer alarm harness to replace the incorrect one that I had just handed in.

I remarked that all of these parts dealings were so easy in Port Townsend and were so, so difficult in La Paz.

---

I don't know whether to blame the effects of the flight from La Paz or the woolly head that I've got from this persistent cold for an omission that I've just noticed in reviewing my recent blogs.

I arrived in Kingston in the wee hours of Friday 19 November and that evening Jak Mang had us over for dinner at his home in Port Townsend.  John an Priscilla had delayed their drive back to San Diego by one day so that we could all get together, and I greatly appreciated that because who knows when we will be able to see each other again.  Unfortunately Jak's wife Corinne was away but we got to meet Jak's interesting next door neighbor who built one of her three small boats on her property, as well as the shipwright who had done work on John and Priscilla's Sparkman and Stephens 43 Rebecca and his wife. We were all the beneficiaries of Jak's love of cooking.

Rebecca is still in Port Townsend where she was purchased last year, and John and Priscilla are making plans to get her to their home waters in San Diego.  To the right is a very familiar photo of Rebecca, since it is the background on my computer display.

Finally, I recently received a message from Bob in La Paz informing me that the "northers" had made a big-time appearance, with winds of 55-60 knots in the Sea of Cortez and 35 knots at the Mogote anchorage.  These are the same winds that flipped our Zodiac over when we were anchored at San Evaristo.  The Port of La Paz was closed, hopefully for not too long.