We’re moving again! Sailing South from FMB to Key West!

Posted on April 11, 2015 by TenaciousHank

First of all, huge kudos to Aramis and Marc for having the guts to come offshore with us on the first trip with that new engine! Fortunately, the sail south from Fort Myers Beach was calm and easy as expected, so I think ya’ll were good luck. We needed to get some high-rpm hours on that new Yanmar 3YM anyway, so when what little wind we had to start left us after about 15 hours or so, it was a welcome feeling to hear the smooth tune of the new diesel rumbling below…

adam and aramis

And she ran like a charm. And so did the crew, because at one point, ehm ehm, Adam CAUGHT A FRIGGIN FISH!!

That fantastically unfrozen, exceptionally raw, especially deliciously fishy fresh fish was a Spanish mackerel somewhere between 16 inches and 75 feet long. We ate some of it totally raw, and Pablo cooked up some scratch-breaded cast-iron fried fish bits and we all feasted like royalty.

When we caught first sight of the northwest corner of Paradise, the sun was high and the water was clear. Mother Nature rolled out her ~~royal red~~ crystal blue carpet for us and the five of us trotted in on Contigo like conquerers. We’d just made a quick-n-easy passage in near nonexistent weather and nothing could go wrong because we were here and it was friggin’ B-E-A-utiful!

The first day we snorkeled around our new anchorage just NW of Christmas Tree/Wisteria Island, which proved to be a great little spot for a few vagabonds on the hook like us.

floating anchorage bait shop key west

That first night we dined at Caroline’s, smoked a fresh Cuban’s cigar… not a cigar from Cuba, but a real live Cuban rolled it!…

… and we partied our minds away at Ricks and Coyote Ugly and Sloppy Joe’s and Irish Kevin’s and just about everywhere we could manage. We didn’t discover the Green Parrot till later, but that totally became my favorite place.

The next day, we tried to start the engine. The starter clicked, and the starting mechanism turned just enough to make the sound of a muffled dumbbell crashing into a concrete slab and bouncing back up to slap us across the face. There was zero movement. I jumped down to check the oil and found this…

Thats water in the oil, which means at least one of a few different things. For us it was one thing specifically: our brand new Yanmar 3YM30 with just over thirty hours on it, was hyrdolocked.

Crash Course on Hydrolocked Diesels!
*** Hydrolocking a marine diesel is what happens when the “wet exhaust” system, which circulates seawater in and out of whats essentially an enclosed radiator called a “heat exchanger” in an effort to circulate heat out of the engine by pumping this warmed sea water out through the exhaust at the back of the boat, messes up by siphoning water back into the engine because the engine is below the water line. What happens: water gets stuck in the cylinders and can’t compress and ignite like diesel fuel, so the cylinder can’t move and “hydrolocks,” preventing the entire system from turning and keeping that starter from starting the engine. Needless to say, saltwater inside an engine can be devastating if not addressed quickly, and thats only if you’re lucky enough that there wasn’t serious damage already done***

The next day we lost Aramis to the real world, but our other stowaway Marc had one more night and it was his birthday. We went out around 10:30pm to party like rockstar sailors, and returned by dinghy around 3:30am to find…

nothing.

Contigo was gone. Seriously, totally, completely, no-kidding-holy-crap-I’m-about-to-have-a-panic-attack gone. If this entry wasn’t already getting long I’d spend a paragraph or two colorfully painting how terrifying and debilitating it was knowing Contigo, our salty chariot, our protector, our floating fortress and humble home, was just…

gone.

After searching in vain within a 200+ yard radius of pitch black anchorage we’d just started getting to know, we asked the neighbors and they said they might have heard what sounded like someone ruffling sails and trying to move it (their implication). We sped back and I contacted the local police and Coast Guard. After a tedious few hours of police reports, we found ourselves waking up in the parking lot at dawn.

One of the officers had suggested a bored, cold hearted, vile, bastard of a local living on one of the floating dumpsters in that area might have just moved it. Apparently, its sort of a “thing” for locals to toy with tourists who anchor in the “locals” spot just north of Christmas Tree Island.

He was right. At dawn I took the dink to the anchorage and found Contigo, rashly anchored and almost aground, on the SE end of the island. It had been a calm night and there were far too many obstacles for her to have dragged anchor and ended up there.

Someone screwed with my boat, and they don’t ever want to meet me. The damned thing couldn’t start anyway… ok I’m getting a bit excited I need to chillax…

Back to figuring out that hydrolocked engine….

After a nail-biting hour or so with the local Yanmar mechanic clearing water out of the engine and explaining what we need to do next, a few trials testing cooling water and compression pressure, incessantly checking oil levels and purity, changing the oil a zillion times, cleaning the valve cover, swapping out the oil pressure sending unit, and ensuring the engine was circulating sea water correctly, plus (especially this one) adding an anti-siphon loop to prevent this problem from happening again, we were again good to go.

Whew.

Brand new Yanmar catastrophe: averted. Lost Contigo: Found. It was already a wild ride in Key West, but we need to get back to partying.

It just so happens that the next friend of ours to visit us, one Casey Clarke, is on deck for a friggin great guest entry coming up next…

Venice to Fort Myers Beach

Posted on March 15, 2015 by TenaciousHank

The whole going aground and leaning over a solid 35 degrees in Venice thing was one of the most hysterical, random, surprising experiences of this trip. We could literally stand on the wall inside the boat like some terrible N’Sync music video, which was hilarious because our too-tall selves could finally stand all the way up. Its the little things…

Luckily the boat was undamaged and our worn-out spirits were brought back to life with every laugh. When we we got going again we headed south, but not before noticing someone else had parked their boat in the exact spot we had the other day…

Granted, the tide didn’t rush out from under them nearly as much, but they were stuck for a couple of days and seeing that mistake right after ours felt validating.

On the way south from Venice…

So we’ve now been in Fort Myers Beach since January 27th and we’re leaving right after St. Patty’s Day on March 17th. That means we will have spent seven weeks here. Thats a solid 45 days longer than we expected…

And its been a blast, but thats for the next entry.

We tried to leave on January 29th (or something like that) and the water pump on the beloved old 3QM went out. I popped it off and saw the solid metal driveshaft for the pump had just broken off. I’m talking some serious metal straight up breaking… ugh.

So we now had to call BoatUS again to get the boat towed from our little emergency anchorage to a mooring ball. We hadn’t met anyone down here yet and my first reaction was to call for a tow. In retrospect, we probably could have managed to tow the boat with the dinghy… not to mention the BoatUS boat engine died two or three times while we were adrift in the mooring field…

Anyway, our time in Fort Myers Beach was all about getting Contigo running again and then enjoying Spring Break like a bunch of locals. And that, we did.

Catching up Pt 4: We Finally Made it!! Well… we made it somewhere…

Posted on February 28, 2015 by TenaciousHank

After a few days of blue water wave riding and wild dolphin sighting, we ran into one thing we just didn’t expect to happen: the wind just died.

The Gulf of Mexico, the Great Washing Machine, was totally dormant.

Without any wind, we trudged on with that old Yanmar 3QM at a modest 1400 rpm to save on fuel. Compounded by the fact that we just can’t seem to get away from trouble with this ancient hunk of diesel chugging iron, we just couldn’t lose that engine.

Then again, we were on a sailboat with 400w in solar panels and provisions for at least a couple of weeks. Not to mention we didn’t have anywhere to be any time soon. Screw it, we could have drifted around for a week waiting for wind if we’d wanted to.

–

Well, then again again, we had ice cold beer and red hot bikini-clad women to track down on a white sandy beach somewhere. As it works out, though, if that wind didn’t pick back up, we barely had enough fuel to make it to the Dry Tortugas. If we didn’t catch some wind soon, we wouldn’t have enough fuel to make the following leg from the DTs to Key West. So, we decided to give it another twelve hours or so of motor sailing and see if anything changed.

Something did change. The wind started breezing from the SE, right where we wanted to go, and we didn’t have a chance of motoring our way all the way there if the wind didn’t swing back around the other side. Without the patience to spend an extra few days tacking around in superlight wind, we decided to hang a hard left and motor for Florida’s nearest coast around Venice.

We arrived in port just in time to crush a few brews and find a good spot in an anchorage just around the corner. Adam was already passed out down below, so staggering from port to starboard we two salty sailors found a great wide open spot in the middle of the anchorage.

We woke up a few hours later, anchored in the same spot, but by now the anchor was irrelevant. [Sorry about the music Mom! I couldn’t help it…]

Apparently, we pulled into Venice during the peak of a rare 3.5 foot tide change. We were hard aground and leaning harder by the moment as the water swept out toward the Gulf and the Moon in the dark night sky above. By 7:00am, we were truly laying sideways in the middle of a dredge shoal.

I freaked out for a minute, realize there was no immediate danger (or anything we could do anyway), poured a round or two of Espolon tequila shots [whats up Harrison’s Landing peeps hanging out after work!!], and we all hunkered down for a slightly sideways night.

While we cruised through about 8 episodes of the Sopranos laying on the wall/floor, I made sure to document as much as possible.

After two separate attempts from the great people at TowBoat US, we stuck around in Venice and waited for the heavy clouds to clear our way back South. Apparently, Fort Myers Beach is pretty cool… Looks like the Dry Tortugas will have to wait…

Catching Up Pt 3: To the Gulf! One wild night and a whole bunch of dolphins!

Posted on February 9, 2015 by TenaciousHank

Here’s Part 3 of Catching Up…

Getting out of Pensacola, away from the ICW, and back into the Gulf was an awesome feeling. We felt like we’d finally gotten somewhere, or rather, we we’re finally going somewhere. After spending the bulk of the trip in the ditch dodging North’ers, trailing tugboats, and dealing with the old diesel, the open Gulf was invigorating.

The forecast called for a breezy first night with Northern gusts up to 20 and waves around four feet. Well, it’s a good thing we were mentally prepared for it.

That first night was a wild one. By 8 o’clock the wind was out of the NNW up to 25 knots and we were running SE at around hull speed. The waves seemed to be changing their mind every hour or so, but for the most part they wanted to come out of the West or WSW. We were making great time but the sail was a bit rough.

When things seemed to settle down for a while I went below to grab some Zs and left Paul at the tiller. This was this guy’s first bluewater experience and he tackled it like a champ. Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico/Great Washing Machine were at least as sloshy as advertised, and things seemed to be changing constantly. At one point the wind died almost completely and Paul was practically surfing Contigo over five-foot rollers with hardly filled sails.

Then the wind changed its mind again and picked up from the North, then West, and we were suddenly on a run. Then the waves changed their mind again too, and they started following the wind. Breaking rollers, now easily eight feet tall and chasing us just off our starboard stern quarter, conditions were getting tricky by the wee hours of the morning.

“Hey Hank! HANK!”

I think I remember hearing the mainsail tear but I’m not sure. When I got above, Adam and Paul were doing whatever they could to get the sails under control in those wild seas, but with full sails Contigo was well overpowered by the strongest gusts yet. We didn’t measure it, but even heading mostly downwind it felt windier than earlier. The waves were doing jumping jacks behind us, clapping against the hull and splashing us in the swinging cockpit every few seconds.

Ok, so it wasn’t quite as bad as that picture…

It wasn’t anything to be too nervous about, but it was just dicey enough to be exhilarating and challenging. We got Contigo back under control with more appropriate sail area and she balanced well even in steady Force 6 winds.

Looks like we’re not bringing that mainsail up any higher this trip.

The thing is, we should have reefed those sails way earlier. Between the three of us, we heaved in the shiny new Genoa to about 30% and started pulling in the haggard main to its second reef. The tear was about 20” long and just above the second reefing point.

Things calmed down enough for the next 48 hours or so for us to enjoy a calm downwind sail. I hope you’re ready for a whole bunch of sunset/sunrise pictures.

[^ Thats the moon rising just above the sun that morning… very very cool!]