No Boat Travel
Living like a nomad, I sometimes wake in the morning wondering where I am. This frequently occurs at transition points like waking up at a busy marina in Key West after several days at remote anchorages. It also happens when there is a significant difference in sounds from one day to the next.
When I went to bed last night, the wind continued to howl as it had most of the day here in Marathon. As I lay in bed this morning trying to figure where I was and what was different, I remembered we are docked at Faro Blanco and the missing sound was the howling wind. The wind continued to blow today but at nowhere near the velocity of yesterday evening. Checking the outdoor temperature revealed that we are, unfortunately, back to long pants and jackets to ward off the chill in the air.
Talking to a fellow looper at docktails night before last, I mentioned that we moved onto Sunset Delight in January. She thought I meant this month. I had forgotten we are now in 2018, so I clarified my statement and then realized that now is the one year anniversary of our moving on board!
At that time, due to the pristine appearance of the hull and cabin, we believed that we had taken possession of a well-maintained vessel. Now it is funny to think that exactly one year ago we boarded our spiffy clean, new-to-us boat naively thinking that the boat survey we paid good money for was accurate instead of the joke it turned out to be.
Last year, after spending two days becoming familiar with the boat in Fort Pierce, we headed on our way to Fort Meyers via the Okeechobee on 1/17/17 and, almost immediately upon leaving the dock, started to compile the list of items in need of repair. In fact, Clark likes to point out to folks that we found problems while still at dock in Fort Pierce such as the plug that had accidentally been left out of the exhaust hose and the engine room filled up with fumes!
As we continued our travels to Faro Blanco to live for the month of February 2017, our list of things to repair continued to grow and grow. Clark compiled pages of items on his repair to-do list. Over the past year we have fixed some items from the list although many Clark has worked on seem to hang around because they are "not quite done". Meanwhile, "fixed" items come back, and new items continue to appear on the list. For example, very expensive battery and alternator regulators work presented itself unexpectedly on the trip this winter. The need for this repair was caused by a poorly designed engine charging system.
Today Clark worked on the hot water heater to repair an annoying antifreeze leak from a hose connection. The rusty and leaking hot water heater was replaced this summer having been added to that long list of things in need of repair created while in Florida last winter. After that grueling job, we hoped that the hot water heater would not need to be touched again for the foreseeable future. Wrong!
To address this drip, Clark had to turn off all the water on the boat, drain the hot water tank, remove the hoses, unscrew the tank from the brackets on the floor and pull it out to get to a wrench on the fittings. Then he had to unscrew the fittings and reseal the pipe joints (this time with teflon tape instead of pipe dope) before putting everything back together.
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| Clark once again at work on the boat |
Unfortunately, we will not know if the leak is fixed until we take the boat out for a ride. When the engines heat up that causes pressure that, before this latest repair, forced small, but annoying, amounts of antifreeze to leak onto the floor. We hope the leak is fixed because this supposedly simple resealing of two pipe joints was a full-day, messy project.
More annoying than the leak, however, is the fact that, although we searched the boat from bow to stern, flybridge to engine room, and everywhere in between, we cannot find Clark's "work" flashlight. I felt like I was playing "Where's Waldo?" as I was convinced the darn thing was hiding in plain sight. We are still on the hunt!
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