Rough day's, the ones i hate
So woke up Sunday morning around 6am, met up my buddy at the boat and we decided for the first few hours we wanted to hook up the kicker motor and install the troll master controller.
We installed the fuel filter seperator and that was pretty easy( was about 5 inches short on the fuel line so needed to buy a replacement)... too easy... so we move on to the troll master. The first part of installing the troll master went smooth, the second part required me to use a supplied bolt. As we were tightening down the bolt, something didn't feel right as it was such a tight squeeze, but it was moving slowly down. Half way the head of the bolt snapped off. I think the troll master came with a bolt with the wrong thread size ( that's for me to take up with them). So i ended up spending the next 2 hours driving to my local stores to find the right part. Went to Autozone and they sold me a remover and it wouldn't work. Next I went to ace, bought a drill bit and a extractor. I used the drill bit, and it wouldn't work on the metal, just spinning in circles. I used my other bits and it didn't work. Then went back to ace and bought a locking pliers to try and grip the bolt and spin it. ( didn't work). Went back to ace and then spoke to the manager about the bit and said i was sold the wrong one, and needed the COBALT bit as it is much harder. This is my 4th time back to ace in 1 hour.
I used the new bit and it drilled through all the way. I then took the extractor and put it in, but i was sold the wrong extractor size! It just slipped all the way through. Went back to ace and exchanged it for the right size. Put the extractor in and hammered it in a little, and then turned. the extractor didn't work, just started spinning. I was pretty angry.
I thought to myself what my options were and i decided to run a larger drill bit through the same hole. I had a bigger bit already so i tried that an eureka it went through and we were able to manually twist it out.Finished the install and by then it was 11:30. I thought to myself we could still make it to the MID and fish for 4 hours. We packed up and hit the road. We got to the mid by 12:45. As I was prepping to launch, i looked at the kicker motor and realized the upper motor cover cowling had flown off as we were driving! Sigh, this pissed me off as now the motor is exposed.
We still decided to launch. As soon as we left the dock, i noticed we were low on fuel. I mean LOW. but i did have a gallon and a half spare on the boat so we hit the water. Started to test the kicker so we set out the troll lines. Trolled for about 30 minutes and the kicker died, out of gas. We were about 30 feet away from shore and panicking, got backup fuel in the tank and started the kicker back up. we started spinning in circles and couldn't figure out why until i realized i unhooked the control rod from the main engine to the kicker. I used the hand tiller and popped it in reverse and got us out.
Since we had only about a gallon of gas, we stopped trolling and decided to B&W one spot. It was a windy day again so anchoring was going to be difficult. Found a spot and finally got anchored. I asked my buddy where he put the bait and he said he didn't realize the bait was in the small cooler in the back of my trunk.
So that pretty much ended our day since we were out of gas and couldn't drive back to the dock to get the bait to come back out.
I ended up taking the boat back home to pasadena area, and got back on the freeway towards pyrmaid looking for the cowling. After 30 minutes i gave up not seeing anything and headed home.
Just one of those days!
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J/K
Originally Posted by TroutOnly
