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Folie a Deux - When given lemons make lemonade



We have been underway for four and a half days now since leaving Darwin Australia.  Turns out Folie a Deux is not a sailboat, but a motor boat on this leg.... no wind, less than 5 knots of wind, hardly any ripples in the water. we are running one engine and then the other at the most economical speed 1800 rpm which moves us at 4-5 knots depending upon the current. that's a fast walking pace. we have been buzzed by the austrailian customs airplane four times yesterday. They must have more fuel to burn, than we do.



Our engines have around 8,000 hours each. Not bad for 14 year old boat. That's over 320,000 miles of car mileage at an average speed of 40 mph.  Brian figured that's also around 700 days of engine running.  This round the world trip has accounted for more engine time than we had planned.  It's generating a fair number of problems. There's some type of small oil leak from the 'breather' on the port engine. maybe a front cam seal leak too.  I'm only guessing that the replaced injectors are increasing the engine pressure.  Those new injectors do seem to give us better fuel mileage. I really do not know enough about engines.



Anyways, those are the lemons, so with the calm weather we changed the oil on the engines.  It's so calm that there's no problem with that. Nicer than being under the sun at an airless marina.



So here's where i come to the definition of a successful project on sv Folie a Deux.  When ever i draw some small level of blood...from a scratch, or at least on a limited basis.  And the great news is, this time, it was a small cut on the finger that was shortened by the wind turbine incident in panama....so i'm getting back to using the hand the way i did before.



Everyone says hi!

Tim, Tracey, Brian, and Lucy

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