I need to get caught up

Oh my word, this blog has gotten so far behind! You don’t know about our visit to Washington DC, our trip back down the Potomac, the fun in Deltaville and Hampton. Or the Dismal Swamp Canal!

Changing the oil filter, I spilled not one drop of oil.

But instead of any of that business, today I’ll tell you about the oil change. Diligent readers will remember a post from April 8 of this year where I crowed about buying a five gallon pail of engine oil. It seemed like a whole lot of oil at the time, and it seemed like it would be years before I actually used it up. Well I am here to report we consumed the bulk of it for one oil change this week.

Cyclops takes 15 quarts of oil in the engine alone. It was time for a change so we did it. The boat has a wonderful oil change pump system that draws oil out of the engine, transmission, or generator (there is a manifold with selector valves), and into a bucket. Then it’s a simple matter to put that hose into a bucket of fresh oil and reverse the pump to fill the engine. Probably the easiest oil change I have ever done.

We collected a vial of the used oil and sent it to a laboratory that will test it and report on its contents. That way we will know if the engine is consuming its rings and bearings, if it has anything in the oil that shouldn’t be there, or if it is as healthy as we hope. Stay tuned for that report.

Because the Dismal Swamp Canal is the place to go to find duckweed and all sorts of other floating whatnot, we also cleaned the raw water strainers for the engine and the generator. Fun stuff! Pesto for dinner tonight.