Boat Issues

We are still in Marathon due to a few problems we have come across on the boat. The first one was the engine breaking down when we arrived at the beginning of December and we have only just received the parts to fix it from England. The delays were due to the holidays, the distance, and the middlemen involved in the process. JR has been working on the engine and now we have another issue with a special fuel return bolt that broke. We searched all around town and were unsuccessful in locating one so JR decided he would just try to make it himself. We bought bolts of the correct size and went to Home Depot to obtain drill bits and a Dremmel drill press workstation. He made a few attempts to drill the center hole in the bolts we purchased, but the drill bit couldn't really make the hole with the best effort just a shallow dent. So he returned to the store and bought the strongest drill bits he could get, which are the cobalt type, to make another attempt at making the hole in the bolt. I don't know what Grade 5 bolts are made out of, but the drill bit was still not able to make the hole through the tough metal bolt. We resorted to contacting the people from the mid-west that we had purchased our engine rebuild kit from to see if they had any in stock and luckily they said that they did have some. So now we wait for this most troublesome part to get here via USPS. A second new problem that arose when we returned from our trip back to Atlanta was the wind generator that stopped working properly. We determined there was something wrong with the regulator because the wind generator would spin, but then the red light would turn on and then the brakes would come on to stop it from spinning and charging the batteries. I am not sure what happened, but JR checked all the connections and the wires he soldered for the apparatus and found everything that he did was still intact. I couldn't believe it was broken so soon because we bought it new this past summer. We had to contact the manufacturer and now we have to mail the generator back to them so they can fix it before we will be able to get it back and re-install it. We have been without an engine and wind generator, which means we can't use much power on the boat. We are lucky to have at least a small solar panel to trickle charge our batteries during the day. I think we should get another just in case there is no wind to provide energy, but we will have to find space on the boat to put it and they are quite expensive. Well we will see what we do because we will always have something that needs work on the boat and we just have to determine how important it is for us to complete those projects before we sail away from the U.S. We are both glad that these problems came about here in Marathon because we are still on U.S. soil and as hard as it has been to get our supplies we would have even more trouble outside the United States. I hope that we get everything fixed and ready to go as I am getting antsy for traveling.
One good thing is that we brought the dinghy we built to test with the new outboard engine and found that the boat works beautifully and really goes a lot faster than our Portabote because of the hard bottom. With the good comes more work though. We had to make a center board plug because water was overflowing in the locker and getting into the hull. We will both be happier and drier when the plug gets finished and no more water gets into the boat. I believe we should get a pump to help bail out the boat (get water out) when it rains and etc. At the moment we are using a slow but effective cup to bail out the water. We will see if we upgrade to something better and faster. Stay tuned.