On the water again

We arrived back in Marathon on Monday evening, November the 2nd. We had a long day as we stopped in Ft. Lauderdale to pick up our bottom paint from a friend of Bruce's who drove it down, stopped for dinner and then did a bit of shopping at the Outlet Mall! Our friends Pat and Addison from Three Penny Opera where here to meet us so they came up to the apartment for a visit and we did a lot of catching up!

The boat looked good when we did a quick check on it the next day and after a good washing and a coat of bottom paint, it was ready to splash once again for another year. I wish I could say that the launch was uneventful but as luck would have it, that was not the case! Actually the launch went well but the trip back to our slip did not. Pat and Addison were waiting for us to arrive to catch some lines and help us in, thank goodness, as we usually are on our own! On the trip over, Bruce noticed that the engine was not running well, not a good thing when you do not have any sails on yet! As we were limping along, we called Addison and Pat to come out in their dinghy to assist us if needed. It wasn't long after that, that the engine conked out completely and Bruce was unable to restart it! Now the wind had picked up considerably and we immediately began to drift towards some other pilings close to shore. Just our luck that there is a late hurricane approaching and that was giving us very windy conditions. Pat and Addison managed to make it in just in time before we were on top of them and grabbed our bow line to pull us away. Now imagine this, they are in a little dinghy with a 9.9 engine and we are in a 22 ton sailing vessel, not an easy task for them! Needless to say after a lot of scrambling and much discussion and yelling of directions, we managed to pick up a mooring ball, just in time we were fast approaching a navigational marker! This also attracted the attention of another small boat who also came to our assistance!
Once we were safely secured on the ball, Bruce went to investigate and realized that the bleed screw to the engine was loose. This was allowing too much air to get into the engine. He tight ed the screw, ran the engine for 5 minutes and we continued on to our dock, whew, definitely tooo much excitement for one day!

We are now safely on our dock and have stopped all work for the day. Tomorrow we will get an early start as Bruce did try to start the air conditioners and the pump had seized once again! We thought we had this problem solved this year. We will spend another night in the apartment and hopefully will be on the boat tomorrow night. Never a dull moment in the land of Bruce and Esther's sailabout! Oh yeah forgot to mention between all of this, Lindsay called to say that our new furnace that we had installed right before we left, had stopped working! She managed to handle that one and the house is warm once again. Apparently it was a loose wire!