12:21 p.m. - Saturday, Jan. 25, 2003
Ms Leslie MAKES a way!
I moved to Valdez, Alaska about a year before the big oil spill. That�s a long story all by itself. As a result of the spill, however, I found myself with a post-spill job working as a contractor for the oil companies in the new program designed to prevent and/or respond to future spills.

As part of that job, I served for a time as the supervisor of an oil spill response barge stationed along with it�s tugboat in a sheltered inlet of remote Naked Island in Prince William Sound.

It was a wonderful assignment. I spent two weeks each month living aboard the tug, working with the three or four sailors assigned to keep the equipment on the barge operational. I don�t think I�m telling any secrets when I admit that there was a lot of slack time.

One of my favorite ways to fill those hours when the work was finished and there was nothing much to do except eat, smoke and watch the same tired old movies and porno over and over, was to take the Zodiac boat off the barge and use it to fish for the abundant halibut that lived in the area. The boat was perfect for scooting around the island and farther into Prince William Sound. It had a fiberglass bottom which was attached to the rubberized inflatable sides. It got its zip from a 25 horsepower outboard motor; A usually very dependable Johnson. Any motor, of course, is only as dependable as its fuel. The biggest problem for this one was keeping moisture out of the gasoline tank. Not only was the air full of moisture from the sea, but the average sixty-inch rainfall inn the Sound insured that water seemed to always be trickling everywhere.

And so it was in the late afternoon when I took the boat�s cook out in the little Zodiak to see if we could hook some decent halibut. It was summertime, so even though the day was drizzly, we could look forward to twenty hours of daylight. There was still plenty of time for fishing. Cook brought a sackful of sandwiches and some cokes to put in the boat, while I made sure the gas tank was full of good gas.

When I hear someone say �Life is Good� I still think about fishing in that little boat on the sound. We had some good luck with the fish, catching several which weighed twenty to thirty pounds. These are called chicken halibut because they�re easy enough to handle and still provide a lot of excellent fish for the table. The sky cleared, letting the sun play on the cold water, flashing diamond-like sparkles across the tops of the ripples. We saw puffins flying low and fast across the water, and even a small pod of killer whales, chuffing and blowing spray in the distance. And all around us were the distant mountains, rising four and five thousand feet, covered with emerald green spruce and fir trees on their flanks and dark gray granite covered in snow which reflected the sunlight in golds, yellows and pale pinks. Life was indeed good.

At last, though, it was time to go back to the tugboat. Even though there was ample daylight, the hour was late and the tides were changing. An evening breeze blew up as well and combined with the rushing tide to begin sweeping our little boat towards the mouth of the sound and out into the Gulf of Alaska. I knew, as I pulled the cord to start our motor, that we had come to the end of our range. It would take longer to motor back to the safety of the tug than expected because of the wind. I knew we couldn�t afford to get much farther away or we could run low on gas.

I loved the feeling of the wind in my hair as I steered the boat full into it. I loved finding a flock of clownish little puffins and chasing them as they flew almost at the surface of the water. In this breeze, the poor birds could only fly about as fast as I could make my boat go. If I could keep them flying into the wind, they would slowly tire and lose ground to the boat. Then, when we were almost close enough to touch them, they�d wheel off to the side and we�d whiz by them as they made their escape. Not only was life good, but the whole world, the whole universe was good and proper and everything in its glorious place.

Right up to the place where the boat�s motor stopped running.

It didn�t sputter or cough, as if it had swallowed some water. It just stopped. I took that as a bad sign, and it was. No amount of pulling on the starter cord would get so much as a sigh from the motor. Something was seriously broken.

Cook, in his childlike fashion, simply trusted me to get us going again. That�s how his life went. He took care of my belly, I took care of everything else. If anyone was going to panic out here, it was going to have to be me. While I yanked on the rope, adjusted the throttle, yanked again, pulled the choke, yanked some more, unbtil it was clear the motor wasn�t going to start, Cook lay with his chin on the inflated boat and dangled his fingers over the side, playing in the cold water.

Along with the sandwiches, I had asked Cook to bring one of the hand-held radios from the bridge. This he had done, but he didn�t check the battery. I got the radio out of the sandwich sack and pressed the transmit key. Nothing. Suddenly I gained a new appreciation for how big Prince William Sound really is�. And how remote. I was adrift with Cook, a sack of sandwiches and a dead radio more than ninety miles away from the nearest town, probably ten miles from the tug, and drifting fast in the very wrong direction. We were in sight of land and it�s possible that with our single paddle, we might even be able to reach land, but that would be very small comfort. Nothing awaited us on shore except wild red berries and even wilder brown bears. I started feeling a little sick.

We hadn�t much use for hand tools in the boat. I did, however, have my trusty leatherman tool. It�s one of those things that opens up to reveal a pretty good set of pliers, a sharp knife blade and a decent screwdriver. Besides that, I did have a small crescent wrench and another pair of pliers in my tacklebox. I took off the engine cover and started trying against time to troubleshoot the engine. All the wires were OK, and there was a spark to the spark plug, I found that out when I held the wire the wrong way and had Cook pull on the rope. Plenty of spark. There was good compression and no clunky noses from the motor. It had to be fuel.

I found the fuel pump and quickly determined that it was not pumping fuel to the engine. I took it apart with my leatherman and soon found out why. Inside was a thin diaphragm. The alternating pressure and suction from the cylinders in the motor moved the diaphragm back and forth which, with the help of a reed valve, which acted as a check valve, moved gasoline up the line and into the carburetor�. Or at least it did when the reed valve wasn�t broken in two, which this one was. Panic time.

There was no obvious answer to this problem. Without a fuel pump, this engine would not run. In the old days, it was possible to run a car engine by dribbling gasoline into the carburetor. That wasn�t going to work on this motor. There was no parts store, no spare fuel pump, no radio, no phone, no pool no pets�.. and I was running out of cigarettes. And this is where I started chanting my little mantra.

�There�s always a way�

I just didn�t yet know what it was.

Since I was out of ideas, I took a different approach. I dumped out the content of my pockets in the bottom of the boat. Then I demanded that Cook did the same. I poked through the ordinary pocket-junk, searching for an inspiration. When that didn�t work I started going through everything I could find on the boat. One of those was the repair kit that held some glue and rubberized fabric in case the inflatable portion of the boat should get a puncture. The fabric caught my eye.

The fuel pump was pretty simple, really. Just a small chamber, about as big around as a quarter and not quite twice as thick. As I studied it, I realized that I could cut a circle from the repair fabric just small enough to fit into the chamber. Once I did that and put the pump together again, the fabric circle wouldn�t be attached to anything, but it would be trapped in the chamber where it would flutter like an autumn leaf, back and forth as the diaphragm pulsated from the pressure of the cylinders. When the fabric fluttered one way, gasoline would be able to flow through the line towards the engine but when it fluttered the other way, it would block off the inlet, keeping gasoline from flowing in the opposite direction. In short� the pump would pump. I could fix it!

Well, this long story gets a lot shorter from this point. My repair worked on the first try. It worked so good in fact, that even after getting the new spare pump, we left my fix in place. It just ran so good, no one ever felt like changing it. Life was good again; better, in fact, because life is never so good as it is when you pull yourself out of a hard problem. All you have to do is remember�

There IS always a way. There is ALWAYS a way. There is always a WAY!

Oh yes� and then you also have to remember to learn from things. Like how to bring a spare battery for the radio.

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