Dead Stop
It’s cold outside. Real cold. Not cold enough that the water freezes – thank goodness! But cold enough that I don’t want to be on the water.
I had an anemometer installed by the marina 2 years ago (found the receipt – it had been that long ago!). But they never connected it to the gauges. I’d called in someone else to come take care of the final steps, but that person never showed up. So for another year, I waited for the marina to get around to it. They didn’t. So I found someone else to do it. This month. In winter. When it’s cold outside.
Well, we found a week when it wasn’t miserable.
I motored the boat to their location, not far off the marina property, docked it and left it for the repair. Then I came the next day, when the repair was done, to return the boat to its slip. As I started to pull away, the engine died, so I pulled back over and tied up again with just one line. I got the engine going and backed up again. The line fell in the water and I thought, “I need to go take care of that.” But at that point, I was drifting towards another boat, felt that was more important, and forgot about the line in the water.
I proceeded to my slip, everything going fine now, until I turned a corner. Then the engine died. At this point I’ve forgotten about the line in the water, so I think it’s engine problems and I try to restart. I do find it odd that I can’t move the throttle back to the neutral position.
Engine won’t start, and I’m too far away from my slip to pull myself in. I’m starting to drift to the other side. So I grab a line and the boat hook and a line, hoping to catch a cleat on the other side. I get the line on the boat hook, move it to the cleat, but can’t catch it before I drift again, this time to the seawall. I pull myself along the seawall until I reach the slips again. I can’t see how I can pull myself to my own slip, so I work on maneuvering the boat into the closest slip, one that’s a bit too small for the boat.
I leave the boat.
I return a few days later to see how things are doing. I haven’t been plugged into power, so the bilge pump has stopped working. It’s rained over the days I’ve been gone, and I have a leaky porthole. I don’t think that much water can get in, though.
I was wrong. There are about 3″ of water over the floorboards.
I grab the hand pump and start pumping out water. It goes way too slowly. I go over to the marina office and explain the situation, asking if they can bring over their portable bilge pump to pump out the boat. They do. They also bring an extension cord so we can get the boat plugged into power. After discussion, however, we just plug me into the neighbor’s box. He hasn’t used power in awhile and I just say that I’ll pay his power bill for that month.
Two months later, and we finally pull the boat out of the water. The line has wrapped around the prop shaft and the strut tightly. Ryan from the marina unwraps it and the shaft goes back into the boat 2″. He tries to put the boat back in the water and the shaft seal is leaking. So he pulls it back out again.
And that’s where we are today, waiting for a new shaft seal to be installed. Waiting for my engine mechanic to give the thumbs up that I didn’t damage anything on the engine. And waiting for weather warm enough to fix the gelcoat from the last adventure.
