" When Pigs Fly"

Our trip south from Morehead, NC was full of excitement, white knuckle stress, confusion, and exasperation along with some relaxation and fun in the new boat. All of these emotions continued right up to our arrival at the Ocean Club Marina in Port Canaveral, more on that later. Anna’s gone home now and I’m spending some quality time with the boat still learning the countless systems. There are always things to piddle with on a boat.

We’re having trouble recreating our boating experiences over these last few weeks so I’m going to give a quick summation hitting some of the highlights ( or low lights, as the case may be).  We mentioned in an earlier post that we were getting hit pretty hard with old boat syndrome, just one of those things to be expected in a 24 year old boat.  In addition the new Pig has seen more running hours in the 2 ½ months we have owned her than in the last several years as a weekender with her previous owner.  

 We got held up one morning due to dense fog.  Just hard to boat in pea soup.

The valiant effort of the sun

One major thing we have learned is that fuel filters are a diesel engine’s best friend.  It’s been a long lesson but I think we got it.  It started out with an ugly cloud that was following the boat as we cruised on the outside for the first time.  We got in to dock for that night with oily black soot all over the transom.   I talked to Ryan, our broker a couple of times.  He’s a pretty knowledgeable about diesel engines and I wanted to pick his brain.  We talked about options but there weren’t too many available considering our position. There had been fuel filters left on the boat but only enough to change one engine.  We changed out the port engine because that was the one that seemed to be producing the smoke. 

This is the third day of smoking.  A big improvement from the first day of soot.

Changing the primary filters helped some and the amount of soot decreased but we were still smoking and washing the boat every night.  Luckily the engines seemed to be running fine, just smoking.  We got in to Savannah a couple of days later and I made arrangements for a diesel mechanic to come in and take a look at the engines to see what the deal was.  Mike, with W.W. Williams met us at the dock.  It was a Friday evening so we were glad he hung around to check in with us.  Mike spent some time with me in the engine room and explained about primary and secondary filters.  He also told us that we were using the wrong size for the primary filters.  The difference was huge.  The filters the former owner had been using were 2 microns.  That’s what I had used for the replacements.  Mike said we needed 30 micron filters.  It’s almost impossible to explain how big the difference is between those two sizes.  The new filters in both engines made a big difference in the smoke. 

Mike also diagnosed another issue that had come to my attention.  The heat exchanger on the port engine had a leak.  This isn’t an immediate show stopper but will need to be addressed soon. A replacement unit will be very expensive so I’m exploring repair options at the moment. 

We got hung up in Savannah because of weather so we had Mike come back and look at the generator which had stopped one day and we hadn’t been able to get it restarted.  We were out of town a couple of days shuttling the truck from Myrtle Beach to Port Canaveral and Mike took care of the generator.  It was the fresh water pump, the bearings were shot. I authorized the repair assuming the pump was an inexpensive fix. Boy, were we ever surprised; to the tune of $2,200.00.  When I mentioned this to Mike he admitted he too was surprised at the price of the replacement pump.  Next time, I’ll ask a few more questions about costs.

We caught the Thunderball Christmas boat festival.  The community held a hot dog and chili dinner.

So we left Savannah with the generator working, new filters all the way around and the knowledge we had one more major repair to deal with down the road.  I had planned to run outside from Savannah to St. Simmons to avoid some treacherously low water in the ICW just south of Savannah.  The spot is called appropriately “Hell’s Gate”.  Even with the tide being just right the most water you’ll see here is 7’ not good when you draw 5’.

We left Thunderbolt Marina in Savannah around 8:00 AM on a falling tide and rode the 4 MPH Wilmington River current the 12 miles out to the sea buoy Green #3 into the ocean and pointed the boat south towards St Simons. Once in the ocean the day was a bit rougher than forecasted we started out with 2 to 3 foot seas and they changed early afternoon to 3 to 4 footers for rest of the day with an occasional five footer thrown in just for fun. The wind was out of the south at 20 knots.  The boat handled great and the salt spray coming over the bow was kind of fun.  Definitely a day for making sure you had at least one hand on the boat at all times. 

We had this reminder that we need to prepare a little better for high seas.  

We got this from an ATM machine and felt like it was worth a pic.  Seems like a good message. 

Cute, huh?

Christmas on the ICW

We ran on the ICW the last two days and finally made Port Canaveral on Tuesday afternoon. Not a lot of time to spare with Anna’s plane leaving Wednesday morning.  It took us a couple of hours longer than we thought. Anna says, “It always takes longer that you think” and normally she’s correct. There was a section of about 30 miles that took more time than I had planned, it was one no wake and manatee slow zone after another.  To top it all off our last 6 miles has two bridges and a lock. The bridges turned out to be non issues but not by my planning. We just got lucky, really lucky, that we didn’t require an opening on either bridge. You see our arrival time also matched the time the bridges were going on a rush hour shut down and wouldn’t open for three hours.  We cleared the first one and asked the lock master to lock us through.  He wanted to be sure we could clear the last bridge or he would have wanted us to stop for the night at the marina on the north side of the lock.  That would have meant we would have been stopped for the night less than half a mile from our winter home.  With Anna’s flight scheduled for the next morning the title of this blog might have been “Mutiny on the Pig”.

Anna’s now at home in KC. I took her to the Orlando airport on Wednesday after spending that last evening packing and doing the laundry. She’s on her annual Christmas jaunt and will return in early January. Hopefully after spending 22 days in the Midwest winter she’ll be glad to return to the land of sand and flip flops. We both are hoping for some company to come down and share some time with us as we relax in the sun and start planning for next summer’s travels.  When Anna returns she’ll have another birthday under her belt but I’ll still welcome her with open arms. You see, I love that old gal.

Happy New Year to you all!

See ya on the water