The "Vroom Vroom Agua" Works!

Remember 8 months or so ago (you know, about the last time I actually published here) when I heckled my husband regarding his newly purchased heck-of-a-steal 13-passenger deck boat that actually functioned as a giant cumbersome canoe? No? Oh here, refresh your memory...it's priceless.

Well, I would be remiss if I didn't break the blog silence to tell you my husband is genius.

After a long winter in a friend's shed, moving the boat to our garage late this spring so we could work on it, finally getting one evening to run/diagnose the engine with two friends from work plus his multimeter and infrared thermometer, hypothesizing the problem was a bad resistor, ordering a $20 resistor, finally getting an afternoon to install said resistor, and Eric being the ultimate pessimist as we pulled the boat into the driveway to put it on the muffs and give it a shot...

The engine fired right up and ran for over 20 minutes, no problem. (It previously was dying after about 10 minutes.)

Always the ever so cautious optimist, I suggested we haul it over to Lake Geode and take it out on the water when the girls woke up from their afternoon nap. (Once and for all proving my unwavering confidence in my husband's mechanical abilities...not to mention his proven capacity to row that sucker back to the dock on his own.)

After an hour and a half of zipping around the lake Sunday afternoon, I would like to officially commend my dear hubby on a job well done. Gabriela was over the top excited to drive the "vroom vroom agua" (her name for the boat) and be out on the water. Lilian was happy too, so long as I kept feeding her a steady stream of Cheerios - that kid seriously eats nonstop now!

I think it's awesome that for a mere $21.14, the boat, whose previous owner spent hundreds trying to solve the engine issue and ultimately gave up and sold the boat for next to nothing, is fixed. Eric is still complaining that it was ridiculous to pay that much for a resistor and piece of wire which probably cost all of 75 cents to manufacture. Sometimes I have a hard time getting that guy to focus on the big picture.