One of the projects on our task list when we made it to Florida was to service the winches. Or, as our friend Nathan says, “SERVICE THE WINCHES!!!”

When we tried to turn the winches by hand, one was frozen and wouldn’t turn. So we figured we’d do them all at the same time. I had no idea what this entails, but luckily there are manuals, and YouTube videos, and lots of instructions. The tricky part, is even the vocabulary of winches is not strictly regular English.

Do you have any idea what a collet is? Or a pawl? Or gear spindle? Since I didn’t know any of these words, it made interpreting those instructions a little bit tricky. And who knew those winches would turn into such a gigantic pile of small parts?

Mike was in charge of taking the winch apart and cleaning all of the parts. I was responsible for applying oil and grease, and putting them all back together. Eventually …… we actually succeeded in getting them all back together. But not on the first day we tried.