Mark and Carol's Sailing Adventure!

Search This Blog

Merry Christmas!

December 24, 2017

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Merry Christmas!

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Pot Warp and Crab Pots

The happy couple... The tool that set us free! Boot Key Harbor Spending Christmas night 40 miles off shore in 15 knot winds and 5 foots waves hung up on a crab pot, was not what I had in mind for our first night at sea. We left mid morning Christmas Day under ideal weather conditions for our overnight journey to Marathon at Boot Key. Our engine got us safely out of the channel and up went our sails! We were cruising along so well that we even talked of slowing ourselves down so we didn’t arrive at the shallow approach to Marathon before dawn. The water was fairly choppy and after lunch the effects of sea sickness started settling in. I’ve been prone to motion sickness in the past but thought I had outgrown it. Taking turns at the tiller before the long night ahead allowed me to take my mind off my ever growing nausea. Sometime in the mid-afternoon 8 or so dolphins graced us with their playfulness and stayed with us well past sunset. My ability to even watch them...

Marathon

Loggerhead Sea Turtle Key West Jack Waterbury's photo January 11, 2018 Marathon Like so many who come through Marathon, we expected to be here no more than a week but now we’re entering week 3. We came here primarily because we heard Diesel Don was The Man who could get to the bottom of our engine problem. I’ve only had brief contact with him and my impression is that he’s a kind man with integrity and espouses in his Florida twang “it’s not done ’til it’s done right!” He’s good natured, very relaxed and seems to genuinely want to help people. Diesel Don determined it was the heat exchanger that's the culprit. It’s been pulled out, cleaned out and fiddled with but one of the steps not taken was soaking it in muriatic acid. Had we done that, we might have saved ourselves further angst. Once Diesel Don got a hold of it, he determined it needed to be replaced which meant another expensive part to be ordered. The shipping was delayed because of the recent snow...

Eleutra!

Oakley Blog Post #3 Oh how good you’ve been to us. We are coming up on two weeks on this spectacular island. We arrived midday after the most eventful night thus far during which we discovered that 6.5 feet is just a tad too shallow for Tarwathie to anchor in with her draft of 5 feet. We reached the only small isolated island between Nassau and Eleuthera at sundown and anchored what we thought was a safe distance from its shore. Around 1:00AM we were awakened by the jarring thud of Tarwathie’s keel sitting down on the soft sand with every passing wave. This went on for several hours and Jos and I opted to go up on deck and stargaze rather than listen to the unsettling, yet not harmful, noises below. It was near the new moon and we had a splendid show of shooting stars. After an hour or so the new moon tide reached dead low and was just enough for the keel to finally rest on the bottom causing the boat to rock slightly from side to side, but not enough to actually cause us to tip ove...

Powered by Blogger

Merry Christmas!

Comments

Post a Comment