We don’t have official log hours for our days at the free town dock in Oriental but a brief recap follows:

we discovered the reason our engine shut down was because we were out of fuel. :) But in discovering this, we found a whole host of other pressing issues: the engine mounts desperately needed to be redone on the port side engine and because the engine was vibrating so much, the steering cable had worked its way off the engine block, meaning we wouldn’t have had the capacity to control the engine if we hadn’t left without discovering this.
Captain OhNo successfully remounted the engine which, in brief, consisted of lifting the engine using a very cool pulley system, grinding the old mounts that had been epoxied to the floor off, resetting the new mounts, lowering the engine and finally aligning the engine. This took 2 full days.
The town of Oriental included us in their New Year’s Eve Celebrations! Usually, a very festive wooden cutout of a croaker fish is raised to the top of the light pole at the town and at midnight it is dropped just like the ball in Times Square…this year though, we rigged it up between our boat and our dock neighbors Arabella! It was a blast.
We had fun walking around the town and getting to know the locals!