Bilge please

It's that time of year when I can't wait to be on the boat again. Even in the engine room.

Getting put on blocks at the end of the season reminds me of C-3PO saying, “That’s odd. The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.” From out here, even the plexiglass monocle over the cracked window looks almost sophisticated.

Part of me stays on the boat, like a lost limb. But every summer I go back and plug the limb back in. I hesitate to weight the bone, though. I don’t know if it’s mine anymore, having spent ten months without it. I don’t know if I’m still a fisherman. But when I lean on the limb, it holds the weight, and I remember that I’m capable of fixing things on the boat when I need to. Capable of navigating storms and logistics, and even catching fish sometimes.

About a week after I started thinking I should check on my new fuel tanks, I got a text from the welder who’s building them. He has the parts bent, and wants to pay to get them to Naknek and start putting them together in April. Soon, he will send me an invoice, and I might have to add money into the business account again to pay him, but I learned the hard way last season about putting off boat projects that I know need doing.

Then the new deckhand who had asked for a job this year backed out. Then my two returning deckhands backed out. Mariah won’t be working in the school next year, but she hasn’t started a new job yet, so theoretically she can still come fishing for a few weeks. And to fill in the other few weeks, I might’ve convinced a deckhand from a few years ago. In my mind, that balances the budget (even though I have to pay the welder before I go fishing, and I wouldn’t be paying the deckhands until after fishing. It’ll work itself out somehow).

As daunting as it is to take the fuel system apart, take the decks apart to swap out the pair of 200-gallon tanks, and plumb new fuel lines, it sounds so much more straightforward than working in a school. I think Mariah would agree. This winter job has me twisted up worse than trying to reach a dropped wrench under the middle of the engine. While the engine’s hot. In a bad anchorage.

I took this picture for the machinist to understand the little conversion sleeves I needed. The red stuff in the bilge is coolant, sadly, because this was in the boat yard before we’d caught any fish. This reminds me I need another part for that coolant leak.

Working with middle and high schoolers who refuse to do work for hours on end, I wonder about work ethic. Why do they not seem to have it? Or do they in something I don’t see because it’s outside school? Does it count as work ethic for me to sit and do nothing except fail at getting them to do something?

At first, in a way, I respected their determination to do nothing, while I still believed I could convince them to channel that determination into school.