Marathon to Key West - our new home for the next 3.5 months

We did it! We're here!! Left Annapolis on October 26, and arrived in Key West on November 30, with one week home for Thanksgiving. The craziest, most fun, most exhausting, most challenging, and most rewarding month I can ever remember.

After our previous 24 days of travel with surprisingly few hiccups, we had our share of mishaps today in what was supposed to be the easiest and shortest leg of our entire trip. A bit of foreshadowing - it all ended fine.

We decided to sleep in, and I did not get up and take Gimel out until 6:30. By comparison, yesterday, we were already under way and entering the ocean at 6:15 a.m. Here was the view from the back of our boat in Marathon before sunrise.

And then, inevitably, the sun came out.

Here was the very short channel from Marathon out to sea.

Throughout the Keys, we saw bridges connecting the islands.

As we left the channel and headed into the ocean, I heard "Oh shit! Oh no!" on my headset. I figured that Gimel had fallen off the boat. But luckily, it was only one of our fenders. With a very strong current and gusty winds, and only about a mile from shallow shoals, we would have to really hustle to get it back. At first we tried having Ann explain where I should go over our headsets while I maneuvered the boat from the pilot house. That did not work well because I had no visibility. So, I came to the docking station in the back of the boat, and tried to get us close to the increasingly faster moving fender. I don't have a way to control the rudders at the docking station, so I had to steer by alternating forward on reverse on the main engine throttles.

I managed to position the boat down current from the fender, and let it come to us. Ann guided the fender towards the back of the boat with a boat hook, and I took the other boat hook and held onto the boat with one hand while fishing the fender out with the other. I put my probability of success at grabbing the fender (which had no line on it) at about 10%. Luckily, this was the one out of ten time that I got it, and we were able to secure the fender and bring it back to our boat. Good thing today was a short travel day because we lost a bunch of time doing this. 

I turned the boat South towards Key West and turned on the stabilizer because we were getting 3-4 foot waves on our stern quarter. Within a minute, the stabilizer control started beeping, and the main panel displayed an error. It was starting to feel more like a real boat trip now between the fender retrieval and now this.

I called our mechanic, and he asked me to go into the engine room and check the hydraulic oil pressure gauge. I sheepishly asked him what that was, and he explained. Not fun hanging out in the engine room under way, but at least the hydraulic oil pressure gauge was in the most difficult spot to get to. I managed to only bang my head once and burned my leg a bit on a hot section of the starboard engine, but I got the photo of the gauge. You can see that the pressure was around 500. It is supposed to be 1,500. 

Meanwhile, we are moving along at approximately 9 knots with no stabilizer. Ann sometimes gets seasick, and so she took some bonine, and I was worried that she might be really uncomfortable. Neither of us realized how much the stabilizers were helping before today. The boat was rolling heavily from side to side.

Our mechanic put us in touch with the rep from the stabilizer company, and he had me try a bunch of things on the control panel. Nothing worked. He then asked me to go back and take some more pictures of various wires and connectors in the engine room, and I discovered that in fact there are more difficult places to get to in there. Lucky me. Rolling from side to side was not helpful in there. I messed around with the wires and connectors. You can see the one just down and to the left of my hand is not lit. That means that the oil pump was not getting a signal to do its thing.

I came back up and tried the stabilizer, but it didn't work. I tried a few more times, and suddenly, the stabilizer turned on. I went back into the engine room again (oy), and saw that the gauge was at 1,500! Also, the connector that was off before was lit up in red, and so somehow my messing with it re-established the connection. The stabilizer worked the rest of the way. I will have someone check out the wiring when we get a mechanic on board.

Pressure is 1,500

Of course, bad things come in threes, so we knew something else would go wrong. Sure enough, as we approached Key West, I noticed that there was an error in our trimtab zipwake controller. So, I turned it off. Did not notice any difference. I think that trim tabs are more useful when you are on plane, which would be around 15+ knots, so not really an issue for us at our slow speed. Still, I don't like it when things don't work. I'll add this to the warranty punch list. We only have another 6 months on our warranty, so we need to exercise everything on the boat as much as we can. Surely everything will break in 7 months.

We had a couple of other things we had to deal with on this trip, and I was able to fix almost all of them with the two most important things you can have on a boat, WD-40 and duct tape. If it's supposed to move and it doesn't, you use WD-40. If it's not supposed to move and it does, you use duct tape. As easy as that! (in all seriousness, WD-40 has been great, but thankfully, I haven't needed duct tape yet)

So, we finally tied up in Key West. It was extremely windy, and I'll spare you the details, but if I thought yesterday's docking was challenging, today's was worse. I would normally not take the boat out on a day this windy, but I had no choice, so I had to dock. We will be sharing the slip with another boat, and all I can say is that I am really thankful/lucky that they were not in the slip today, or this could have ended differently. But like I said, nobody was hurt, and nothing was damaged, so it was a success.

Empty Nest finally tied up in Key West!

Traveling each day was almost as fun as blogging about it every night. To those of you who have been reading the blog, I thank you, and now I'll be taking a break for a few months! Until then, Rubin out!