Slick moves.

I can't tell if Mack likes the boat more or the engine more. He's always under the floorboards fiddling with what he's nicknamed Perky. Just when I thought there was nothing left to do down there, he said, "It's time to change the oil."

He ordered a $18 pump off Amazon to help get the old oil out. We didn't know what to expect with this pump or how much oil would come out, so we lined the shop vac cylinder with a garbage bag and hoped for the best. We also moved all the settee cushions to the berth for safety. Luckily, the pump did the trick and soon enough Perky was being drained of all that black tainted blood.

The hardest part of pumping the oil out was sitting there holding the pump and tubes for like 15 minutes and not getting oil everywhere. I did a little garbage bag pump painting while I waited. Mack just looked adoringly at Perky.

​Once we were pretty sure we'd pumped as much as we could out of the engine, it was time to take the oil filter off. Again, we had no idea how much oil would spill out of that so one of us held a garbage bag under it while the other unscrewed it. The hardest part of that was also not getting oil everywhere. 

With the old oil out, we drained the tubes from the pump and capped them with some rubber gloves using a nursing technique I learned called "cover the chest tube so goo doesn't come out on you when you move them to the morgue."  Then we headed to the oil waste receptacle up at the clubhouse. 

Mack did the dirty work at the receptacle, and I stayed clean because my job was to fetch paper towels from the bathroom. I also had the job of looking at these beautiful flowers and sending my Aunt Tina a picture of them to brighten her day. I'M BUSY.

Refilling the oil was pretty uneventful. We just used a funnel and poured some in. Then we checked the dipstick. Sometimes it looked like we had overfilled it, sometimes it was just right, and sometimes it didn't even register on the dipstick. Eventually we ran the engine for a while to toss the new oil around a bit and then took a reading. The dipstick looked spot on, but I have a feeling Mack will be pulling up the floor boards just to check every time we go on Kenutu.